He bent forward, clasping both hands over his nape.
Sean squatted opposite Eddy. That way, if Daniel suddenly keeled, they could both catch him. “Did you, like, wrench your neck?” he asked. “Because I got your brace back. Your shoes, too.”
Daniel shook his head, and it did seem to move without a hitch, no grind, no pop. “I’m okay,” he said, muffled. “I don’t need the brace.”
Since when?
Eddy touched Daniel’s bare left foot. He jerked it back and draped it over the right one, curling both sets of toes—crazily long ones, and yes, scarred like his fingers. Then he swung his legs into the Civic and muttered, “Let’s just get out of here.”
Fast as they could, Sean and Eddy racked the kayaks and stowed the carts, then Sean piled into the driver’s seat, Eddy into the shotgun. Lately, she’d been riding in back with Daniel, but with him still clutching the back of his supposedly okay neck, she must have figured he wanted space.
The sunbaked parking lot had left the Civic stifling. Sean started it up and dialed the AC to HIGH. He zigged and zagged around illegally parked cars and turned left on Harbor Street. Eddy made him pull over by Saltonstall Park, under the first available shade tree. “We’re not going to the house?” he asked.
“Not yet.” She twisted to kneel on her seat. “Unless you want us to, Daniel.”
He let go of his neck, but still clutched the shirt tight around it. “No.”
“Can we talk about the accident?”
Daniel sighed. Nodded.
Sean knelt on his seat, too. “That kid did a full body plant on the breakwater.”
“He was alive, though,” Daniel said. “At least I think he was. And the officers started CPR the second they got him out of the water. Then I—I had to go.”
“I bet he’ll be all right,” Sean said. “Even if you’re knocked out, your throat kind of closes up when you go underwater. You don’t drown right away. We learned it in lifeguard training.”
“He broke an arm, though. And cracked his head bad.”
Eddy looked at Sean, raising her brows. Right, she hadn’t seen how the kid fell. He told her the story in skeleton form, then said to Daniel, “Whatever happens, you did as much as anyone could have. More! Man, I couldn’t dive half as deep as you did, not without scuba gear.”
“I had to try,” Daniel said.
“You didn’t try, dude. You did it. You saved the kid. You and the porpoises. You’re heroes.” Sean turned to Eddy. “These two big ones that came up after the pod swam toward the beach? They helped him lift the kid to the surface. I don’t know if anyone saw that but me.”
“Did they, Daniel?”
“Yeah. I guess the stories about them are true, how they’ll rescue people sometimes.”
“You had to swim down forty, fifty feet. How’d you—?” Sean shut up before he started sounding like a cop: How’d you dive like that when you’re terrified of water, huh, Daniel? And how’d you swim to shore like you’re in training for the Olympics, no biggie, go this fast and far all the time? “Well, anyhow. You’re the hero, dude. If you’d hung around, you’d be topping the evening news.”
“Last thing I want is to be on TV.”
Sean shut up. So did Eddy, until Daniel looked up at her and shrugged. “Go on. Sean wouldn’t ask. You do it.”
She shifted her knees on the car seat, as if bracing herself. “You said you have a water phobia, especially about the ocean. You weren’t afraid of it just now.”
“I’ve never been afraid of it,” Daniel said.
“You never nearly drowned when you were a kid?”
“No.” Daniel twisted his shirt scarf tighter. “Before I came to Arkham, I used to dive and swim all the time, in our condo pool, if nobody else was around. And in the ocean, at our summer house. We’ve got, like, fifty feet of beach, but it’s private.”
“Then why did you lie to us? Why wouldn’t you swim here?”
“I couldn’t, not if I wanted the new treatments to work.”
“Treatments for the car accident?”
“There wasn’t any accident.”
Eddy clutched the headrest until Sean thought her nails would punch through the vinyl. Whenever Dad put that kind of grip on something, he was fighting off the impulse to punch somebody. No way Eddy would punch Daniel, but her voice was tremblingly tight: “What’s wrong with you, then?”
Daniel had major balls, not to drop his eyes from hers. What he did drop was his shirt. “This is what’s wrong,” he said.
Darker red stained the red cotton. Darker red, fresh, still trickled down Daniel’s neck, so it hadn’t been Brendan’s blood on him, after all. The five long parallel scratches on each side of his throat made it look like he’d stuck his head in a toothy machine, a harrow maybe, and wounded himself while pulling free. There could have been a rusty old harrow on the bottom of the harbor. But would it make scratches that quivered like these? That fanned out from Daniel’s neck when he breathed in and fell when he breathed out. That, if you looked closer, weren’t bleeding from inside the slits but from the skin that seemed to have torn and retreated from their stiff edges.
So, if you didn’t have to wear a foam brace to support your injured neck, why would you wear it? To hide something. Like a vampire bite.
Or gills. Definitely. Gills.
15
Not that Sean would have expected Eddy to belt out a B movie scream at the mere sight of someone’s gills, but the scream would have been less unnerving than the way she went the color of skim milk and slumped down silent in the passenger seat. Was he supposed to know what to do next? The best he could manage was to look straight at Daniel—at his face, not at the quivering slits in his neck—and to keep his voice out of the soprano range. “So, that’s like, you’re not hurt?”
“Nothing that’s going to kill me.” Daniel leaned forward as if to peer at Eddy over the seat, but he chickened out and fell back. Did she faint? he mouthed at Sean.
Sean shook his head.
Without turning to look into the backseat, her voice a rigid monotone, Eddy said, “Do you want to tell us about this, Daniel? Because we should go to the house first.”
“No. I have to go to Geldman’s.”
“Hey, man,” Sean said. “You could skip one lesson.”
“Not for a lesson. I need him to—” Daniel raised a hand to his neck, not quite touching the slits. “—start fixing this.”
“Fine,” Eddy said.
Geldman’s Pharmacy, your one-stop spot for everything from stomach aches to gill repairs. Sean twisted around and started driving.
* * *
One glance at Daniel, and Geldman led them all into the white corridor behind the counter. The door through which he ushered Daniel opened on what looked like a Victorian doctor’s office. Before closing it, he asked Sean and Eddy to wait in the back parlor. They’d barely settled into the accommodating armchairs when Cybele appeared with tea. She poured two cups from the same pot, but the one she placed before Eddy held a much darker brew than the one she placed before Sean. When the girl had gone to assist Geldman, Eddy pushed her cup away. Rejection caused the tea to steam forth the fragrance of poppies, which seemed to lure Eddy into draining the cup while having no particular effect on Sean. His own tea tasted like plain old orange pekoe. Apparently the sedative air freshener the green candles exhaled was all he needed to calm down, and there were plenty of greenies among the legions of never-diminishing white.
Eddy’s tea brought back her color. More important, it melted the silence so unnatural in her that Sean didn’t mind when she immediately began grilling him. “Daniel never told you about why he really wore that brace?”
“Ah, no.”
“Hinted?”
Perhaps because Boaz sensed something crowish about Sean these days, he came to his defense. Eddy had taken the armchair beneath his perch, and he beat his wings until her hair blew in all directions. “Hell no!” he croaked. “He’d have told you, wouldn�
��t he, wouldn’t he? Let you kiss a fish, hell no!”
Eddy went red. “Shut up.”
“Let you kiss a frog? Hell no! No prince under there, just fishy frog.”
“Shut up!”
Sean tossed his new bro a scone from the tea tray. Boaz caught it, shook crumbs onto Eddy’s head, then flew upstairs with his prize. Finger-combing scone out of her hair, Eddy muttered, “Dumb-ass bird.”
“Hey, don’t dis my people.”
“It’s the truth, though? You’d have told me if you’d known?”
That Daniel was the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Which he wasn’t, but whatever he was. “Eddy, I didn’t know. Sometimes I wondered, the way his neck never seemed to bother him. And that water phobia thing. If he really had that, why’d he like going out on the jetty so much? And, thinking back, he had this book Geldman lent him.”
“The one with the pictures of mermaids? But weird ones, more like frogs than fish. The name was something about Atlantis.”
Someone rapped gently on the parlor door. When Geldman entered, he said, “You’re thinking of On the Mysteries of the True Atlantis off Novo-Anglia.” He stepped aside to let Daniel come in, his neck lightly bandaged, his wet clothes exchanged for a white shirt and gray slacks that, somewhere between Geldman’s closet and Daniel, must have magically tailored themselves to fit their borrower.
“That’s the book,” Eddy said.
Geldman wheeled over his desk chair and nodded Daniel onto it. “A colorful but misleading title. The gentleman author was mistaken about his subject, which wasn’t Atlantis but Yehanithlayee. Well. I need to prepare a draft for Daniel and call Helen Arkwright.”
Geldman left the parlor. In the dancing light of the candles, Daniel’s Frodo hair looked wilder than ever, but his face was beyond calm, like a prisoner’s who was resigned to whatever judgment the court meant to throw at him.
And Eddy started the throwing: “You know what pisses me off, Daniel? Maybe you had to wear the collar in public, but why’d you have to wear it around us? Why’d you have to lie about a car wreck? I’ve told you all about the Servitor. You should’ve realized we could handle weird situations.”
“That wasn’t something weird about yourselves.”
True, because the Servitor hadn’t infected them with tentacles or anything. “Good point,” Sean said.
Fixed on Daniel, Eddy ignored Sean. “Sure, you’d be nervous at first, but after we’d hung out for a while? And especially after you and me got together.”
“You’re right, Eddy. I should have told you.”
Smart man, but—
Eddy wasn’t relenting yet. “And what does having gills mean, anyway? You can’t be like the mermen in Geldman’s book, because there’s—” But she didn’t say the rest: There’s no such thing. According to the kind of people who’d use that catchphrase, there was also no such thing as a wizard, or a Servitor, or a stained glass window that held a whole world in suspended animation. No Orne. No Outer Gods. No magic.
Daniel reversed her unfinished assertion: “There is such a thing. As merpeople. In a way.”
Still in beach gear, shorts over a bathing suit, Eddy chafed her bare arms. His own shorts and T-shirt salty damp, Sean shared the chill, but it was his aching temples he rubbed. That place Geldman had mentioned. Yeha-something. “Yeha—”
“Yehanithlayee,” Daniel said. “The True Atlantis. A city under the ocean.”
“And it’s in New England?”
“It’s near here. Off Plum Island.”
Plum Island was north of Arkham, off the coast between Newburyport and Innsmouth—
Innsmouth.
From the clenching of Eddy’s jaw, she remembered at the same moment Sean did. “The underwater city in Lovecraft’s story,” she said. “Where the Deep Ones lived.”
Daniel nodded.
And, according to Lovecraft, the Deep Ones were amphibious monsters just anthropomorphic enough to hook up with humans, and the results were human at first, until they started morphing into something like those True Atlantis merpeople after all. “You’re a Deep One, that’s what we’re getting at?” Sean said.
Daniel touched the side of his neck, where a little blood had seeped through the bandage. Then he nodded again.
In the quiet that followed, the sound of Boaz hopping across the floor overhead was harsh as hailstones on tin. Sean kept looking at Daniel, and Daniel kept looking at Eddy, which proved he was a much braver man than Sean, who didn’t dare check out her face until her response told him how hard she was taking the confession. The way the corner of Daniel’s mouth twitched, this second bout of Eddy silence was killing him. Finally he ventured a low, “I’m sorry, Eddy.”
And after all their suspense, Eddy just sounded tired: “I’m sorry, too. You should’ve told me.”
They’d already played that blame game. “Look,” Sean said. “I’ve read ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth,’ but I don’t know shit else about the Deep Ones. And maybe ‘Shadow’ is wrong about them? Helen’s always saying how Lovecraft was a member of the Order, but he used to drive the other members nuts by writing ‘fiction’ about Mythos facts. And then he’d drive them nuttier by changing some facts to suit himself. Maybe you’ve got the real scoop?”
Tough question or not, Daniel looked glad to be off the “should have” hook. “Well, Lovecraft wrote that after the Feds found out monsters had taken over Innsmouth, they put half the residents in detention camps and then torpedoed Devil Reef, where their underwater city was supposed to be. But Geldman was around here in the ’20s. He says the real reason the Feds went to Innsmouth was reports of bootleggers. The Order got wind of the raid ahead of time. It knew about the Deep Ones in Innsmouth, so it warned them to lie low. All the Feds really carted off were a few truckloads of whiskey from Canada. That was the fact Lovecraft didn’t like, how the Order had allied itself with the Deep Ones. I guess he wished the government would wipe them out, and so that’s how he had things happen in the story.”
“So, wishful thinking?”
“Looks like it.” Daniel smoothed his borrowed trousers. “It’s crazy complicated, though. I’ve read ‘Shadow’ over and over. In the end, the guy that rats on Innsmouth to the Feds? He finds out he’s a Deep One himself. He’s freaked out at first, but then he starts liking the idea, and he dreams how Yehanithlayee wasn’t destroyed, just a little damaged. The Deep Ones are still down there, and when he changes, he can go, too, and live in glory. That’s how he puts it, ‘in glory.’ What are you supposed to think about that?” He glanced again at Eddy.
Sean also dared a glance. Changing the subject from bad boyfriend behavior to the Deep Ones themselves could have gone two ways—either to boost Eddy’s Irritation Threat Level or to distract her. Sean considered it a win that she had shifted forward in her armchair, forehead corrugated with concentration. “The Order helped the Deep Ones?” she asked.
Daniel matched Eddy’s forward shift with a sideways scoot of the desk chair, halving the distance between them. “Geldman says the Order respects them as fellow magicians—all Deep Ones are magical, I guess. Plus they’re native to Earth, like humans—you can’t say they don’t belong here as much as anyone does. And if humans messed with them, they’ve got the magic and tech to mess back a lot harder. Eventually the Order told the government enough to make them leave the Deep Ones alone, and now the Order and government are kind of partners in keeping them secret. That’s about all Geldman’s told me so far. I’m grateful he told me anything.”
“Why?” Eddy said.
“My father doesn’t want me learning about my Deep One half.”
Eddy beat Sean to the big-money word in that sentence: “Half?”
“Sure. I’m half human, too. A hybrid. How Deep Ones and humans could, well, interbreed—that’s one of the genuine facts in Lovecraft’s story.”
“Then Deep Ones and humans must be the same species, or at least subspecies! Otherwise, they couldn’t have children.”
Daniel’s laugh was sharp edged. “Way, way back, they were probably related, yeah. There’s something more going on. Geldman explained it to me and my father. Deep One DNA is mutable. Not just the usual way, through mutations—in a Deep One sperm or egg cell, it can rearrange itself to mimic human DNA, boom, now the species are interfertile. But the rearranged Deep One DNA still has these dormant trigger genes. The hybrid looks human until the trigger genes kick in and start rearranging the DNA back to Deep One. Usually it starts at twenty, twenty-five years old, but it can start earlier. Like with me.”
“How early?” Sean said.
“When I was fourteen, this happened.” Daniel held up both hands and spread his fingers wide. From their bases to the first joints, pinkish skin stretched. Fine capillaries infiltrated the translucent webbing; when Sean squinted, he could see them pulsing. “It’s the same between my toes.”
“But you only had scars there this morning,” Eddy whispered.
“This is how my hands looked just before I came to Geldman. See, the Change is mostly a biological process. It moves slow. Geldman’s treating me with magic, which moves a lot faster. But if I immerse myself in water, especially seawater, his magic’s blown, and everything reverts to where it was before his treatments.”
“So today, when you jumped in after that kid,” Sean began.
When he faltered, awe-smacked by the double courage of Daniel’s action, Eddy finished: “You knew what would happen.”
“Well, you both saw. The water ripped open the skin that was starting to seal my gills. That let me breathe through them while I dived. But now—” Daniel dropped his hands to his knees, closing the fingers tight, hiding the webs. “The Change has started again.”
Eddy got up and sat on the edge of the tea table, another move closer to Daniel. Candle flame licked the tuft of her braid without setting it on fire, but for his own peace of mind, Sean pulled the offending candelabra toward him. “So Geldman’s treatments are to reverse your Change?” he said.
Fathomless Page 16
