Fathomless

by Anne M. Pillsworth

  “Reverse it. Keep it from starting again. I take, like, five different potions every day, and they have to be made fresh, so Geldman’s going to teach me how to compound them for myself. I’m already helping Cybele make my, um, cologne.”

  The cologne that had teased Sean’s memory for so long with its scent of fresh-mown grass and herbs. “It’s Cybele’s Number One! The stuff Helen put on her Servitor burns.”

  “Close, but that’s a healing balm. Mine’s liquid, a spray.” Daniel coughed, eyed Eddy. “And it’s not really cologne. It’s a deodorant. If I didn’t use it every day, I’d smell like a Changer, and nobody’d want to come within a mile of me.”

  It was Sean’s turn to jolt forward from the cradling cushions of his chair. “You’d smell?”

  “I’d reek, like a dead fish.”

  “And, um, like gym clothes that’ve been smooshed in the bottom of your locker too long?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  Eddy realized where Sean was heading. She scowled at him. “You’re thinking about Mr. Haddock.”

  Why not, with his stink and his flipper-sized feet and the way he zipped his Windbreaker collar up over his neck, maybe for the same reason Daniel had worn the brace? “He fits Daniel’s description, how you can’t come within a mile of him.”

  Daniel sighed. “Yeah, you and Eddy might as well know it now. Mr. Haddock’s a Changer, a hybrid turning into a Deep One. I was pretty sure, and Geldman confirmed it. He’s been watching the guy, too, how he shows up at Tumblebee’s whenever I’m due at the pharmacy. How he follows me sometimes when I leave.”

  “He really does?” Eddy said. “We weren’t just being paranoid?”

  “Not according to Geldman.”

  “And he was at the beach today,” Sean put in. “Watching you on the jetty. He’s the one who gave me your neck brace and shoes from off the jetty. He knew I was your friend.”

  Eddy hugged her upper arms to her sides. “I didn’t like Mr. Haddock before. Now I’m really creeped out.”

  Daniel’s lips tightened. “I guess I must creep you out, too, then.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Because if it weren’t for Mr. Geldman and Cybele, I’d look and smell like Mr. Haddock. Or worse. By now, I’d be totally Changed.”

  The way Eddy flushed and stammered, she hadn’t at all realized how Daniel might misunderstand her. “No, Daniel! I didn’t mean because he was a—a Changer. I’m creeped out because of how he’s following you. What’s that about? Does Mr. Geldman know?”

  “He says Changers come to Arkham pretty regularly. Some do business at the pharmacy. Mr. Haddock hasn’t come to see him for a while, but he has in the past. Geldman says he’s sure the guy doesn’t mean any harm. He supposes Mr. Haddock could have spotted me by chance, and now he’s curious about me, a hybrid who’s not from Innsmouth.”

  Daniel had been reaching for Eddy’s hand, little stretches toward it, little jerks back. When she finished the reach for him and clasped his hand firmly, webbing and all, his tension-hitched shoulders relaxed.

  Sean gave them a minute before he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to ask, “But how did Mr. Haddock even know you’re a bro? Since you don’t look or smell like him.”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Maybe the way any magician can pick up on another one. The energy signature thing.”

  It could be, but Daniel didn’t sound convinced or convincing. Probably he was just worn out, exhausted by the adrenaline rush and exertion of the rescue, the anxiety of revealing his big secret. Sean felt ready for a three-day nap himself, not for processing any more information, even if Daniel wanted to give it. The questions swarming in his head would have to wait. Eddy and Daniel continued holding hands. (Did Daniel’s webbing feel all rubbery?) They were getting cool with each other again, and they were both cool with Sean, and they were all cool together. He leaned back and closed his eyes. So, Daniel’s father hadn’t told him he was half Deep One. The Deep One half had to come from his mother. Who’d died from leukemia. Or had it been from something else, some Deep One blood disease the human doctors hadn’t known how to treat?…

  Another soft knock on the parlor door heralded Geldman’s return. He gave Eddy and Daniel plenty of time to drop hands before walking in with a steaming mug for his patient and Helen right behind him, come to herd all her pain-in-the-ass lambs home.

  16

  Daniel rode back to the Arkwright House with Helen. Sean and Eddy rode back in the Civic, picking up pizzas for dinner on the way. They had to eat their share alone; when they arrived, Helen and Daniel were already locked in her office. An hour later, the door remained shut. Sean paused outside long enough to hear Daniel’s voice, raised, angry, but Eddy hissed at him from the stairs, and he had to abort the eavesdropping mission.

  Another half hour passed before Daniel pounded up to the common room to join them. He veered toward the couch, as if to sit next to Eddy, then went instead to a chair at the game table, where his elbow knocked the tiles on a half-played Scrabble board into gibberish. Through clenched teeth, he said, “So you called me a hero.”

  His glare arrowed past Eddy to Sean. Not that it wasn’t true, but when had he called Daniel that? Oh, at the beach, after the rescue. “Ah, yeah?”

  “My father just called me everything but a hero. Helen phoned him. I’m not blaming her, that’s her job, and I’ll bet she’s sorry, the way he hit the ceiling. How could the Order let me near the ocean? Like I’m a kid they could pen in behind a toddler gate. Then he started on how I should’ve known better, wasn’t I listening to Geldman?”

  “Man, I’m sorry.”

  “So I told you guys I got to Arkham the same day you did? I came to the Arkwright House the same day, but I was living in this apartment near the pharmacy for three months before that, getting my treatments. My father wants me to go back there. I told him no way, not when my friends are at the House, first friends I’ve made since the Change started. Of course, then he had to know all about you and Eddy. Especially about Eddy, the minute I let out she’s a girl.” Daniel abruptly shut up.

  “It’s okay,” Eddy said.

  “It’s not okay. He made me admit we were going out.”

  “So?”

  So Daniel got fascinated with the messed-up Scrabble game. He started arranging tiles on a rack. “He said I was crazy. He said you’d be crazy, too, if now that you knew what I am, you didn’t blow me off completely.”

  It wasn’t magic that set Sean’s skin prickling but his own shock and Eddy’s vehement headshake. “Daniel,” she said. “He didn’t tell you that.”

  “He did, all right. He can’t believe I’d—” A tile fell from Daniel’s fingers. He racked it, looked at whatever word he’d made, then pushed the rack over. “He can’t believe I’d act like my mother did, tricking a normal person into being with me. He said, maybe it’s in the Deep One genes.”

  The prickles in Sean’s nape turned to stabbing needles. After a few seconds, Eddy walked to the game table like there were eggs underfoot. Sitting opposite Daniel, chin up, eyes too bright, she didn’t touch him as she had at Geldman’s. “It sucks that your father said that.”

  “You think?”

  “I know. But what did he mean, your mother tricked him?”

  Daniel chewed at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It must have hurt, because he winced and rubbed that hand on his thigh, on Geldman’s gray slacks. “You want to hear the long story, after everything you’ve already heard today?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me. Us. The truth.”

  “Maybe you want some pizza first?” Sean suggested. “We already had ours.”

  “No. My stomach feels like it’s upside down. Maybe a Coke.”

  Sean brought him a bottle from the kitchenette refrigerator, then returned to his recliner, figuring it was enough for Eddy to be at the table, Daniel didn’t need to be crowded.

  Daniel drank half the bottle. Then he said,
“When the Change started for me? My father paid for specialists, and second opinions, and third opinions. The docs finally agreed I had some kind of rare genetic anomaly. They sent me to a medical geneticist who got excited when he found case histories like mine. My father stopped taking me to him once he found out all the case history patients had ended up in asylums, no cure. Then he took me to plastic surgeons instead, and they cut away the digital webbing. And to dental surgeons, for implants.”

  “Something happened to your teeth?” Eddy said.

  Daniel pulled a tight grin, flaunting his perfect grille. “These are fakes. Implants. My own teeth fell out when new ones grew in behind them. Shark teeth. The dentists pulled those out and plugged these in. Well, not these exact ones. I’ve had the implants redone twice, because you know about sharks, how they have spare teeth lined up in their jaws? So do I now. They shove the implants out of the way, or grow around and stick out over them.”

  Sean swallowed. “That’s got to hurt.”

  Daniel shrugged. Now that he’d gotten started, he plunged on: “The worst part is how my father always knew exactly what the Change was. He’d seen it before, when it started for my mom, and in the end she told him the truth. Okay, so he couldn’t tell the doctors. But he didn’t tell me either, not until my gills emerged. He couldn’t get any doc to remove those or even cover them up—they said the connections between the gills and my lungs were too complicated. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t ‘cure’ anything for long. The webbing grew back. The teeth grew back. My ears were shrinking. Even my bones were changing, like, my fingers and my toes getting longer.”

  “You had to be scared,” Eddy said quietly.

  “I was, but it was funny how I remembered my mom before she went away to the hospital. She’d started wearing a scarf around her neck, gloves all the time, even this mouth guard. Obviously, right, I had the same thing she’d had? I thought I’d die from it, too, but at least it was a connection to her.”

  Sean’s speculation at Geldman’s had been correct: Daniel’s mother hadn’t died from leukemia. It sounded like she’d died simply from Changing. Bad, but he could understand the connection thing. “After my mom died?” he said. “I thought every stomachache I got was cancer, same as hers.”

  Daniel gazed at him for a long time. Then he looked back down at the Scrabble chaos. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. But.” Sean paused for another swallow. “So after your gills showed, that’s when your father told you about the Deep Ones?”

  “What little he knew. Eventually he admitted my mom hadn’t gone to a regular hospital. It was a sanitarium. She was going to stay there where no one could see what was happening to her, especially not me. And my father was going to find the cure for her. Only my mom got tired of waiting. She gave up. She hanged herself.”

  Eddy pressed a hand to her mouth, muffling her “No.”

  Sean kept swallowing, and it kept getting harder.

  Daniel slogged on, monotonous: “She killed herself. My father said he wasn’t letting me get to that point, it didn’t matter how crazy the solution was. And a crazy solution came up pretty soon afterwards. The medical geneticist had kept digging on his own. He ran into stories about the Deep Ones. Legends. What most doctors would toss as paranormal bullshit. He followed up on the legends until he found the Order, and the Order sent him to Geldman. Dr. Bremerton—that’s the geneticist—he’s a member of the Order himself now. He contacted my father about Geldman’s offer to treat me magically, and my father agreed, and I came here.”

  He stopped and looked at Eddy. She still had her hand over her mouth. He slogged on again: “Geldman’s treatments were working fine until today. All I had to do was keep from immersing myself in water, especially salt. A quick shower’s all right, or rain. Not immersion. That’s why I didn’t jump in right away after the kid fell. I waited to see if Sean could reach him.”

  “You jumped in soon enough,” Sean said.

  Eddy dropped her hand gag. “And you had to. Geldman must get that.”

  “Oh yeah, he does. He believes in karma, even if he doesn’t call it that. Help someone, your magic gets stronger and purer. Hurt someone, it gets twisted. The porpoises did a lot, though. They’re supposed to be Deep One allies, according to the True Atlantis book. Maybe they were hanging around the jetty because they recognized me, and that’s why they helped me with the kid.”

  “Or they were there because of Mr. Haddock?” Sean said.

  “Maybe.”

  Instead of sinking her marine biologist teeth into the idea of porpoise allies, Eddy stayed focused on Daniel’s situation: “Geldman needs to talk to your father, then. To make him realize you were a hero.”

  She’d meant well, but Daniel reverted to the scowl he’d brought into the common room from Helen’s office. “All my father cares about is for me to be normal. He’ll take me being a magician if he has to, but I better be a human magician.”

  A soft click from Eddy’s throat shut him up. He shook his hair, still ocean tangled, over his eyes and looked at her through the curtain. “Not that I don’t want to be human, too. All the way, down to the genes, if Geldman can eventually pull that off.”

  Sean puzzled over Eddy’s flush until he brightened up and realized that Daniel was hinting at kids. Really? Daniel was thinking that far into the future about him and Eddy? And was she, too? He gave his throat a thorough clearing. “You think Geldman could get rid of your Deep One DNA?”

  “He doesn’t know if he can. Right now he’s just thwarting the trigger genes.”

  “If anyone could, though.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  Eddy went for Daniel’s hand, and again Sean wondered about the feel of the webbing (rubbery? clammy?), but she didn’t twitch an eyelash. For a minute it looked like they’d all get back to the equilibrium Helen had interrupted at Geldman’s. Like Daniel had said, it hadn’t been Helen’s fault, but Sean’s gut tightened a little when she walked into the common room looking too sober for his comfort.

  “Daniel,” she said. Soberly. “I told your father you’d call him after you’ve had a chance to absorb what happened today.”

  “I’m sorry I took off—,” Daniel began.

  “That’s all right. It was probably better you did. Could you come out here for a minute?”

  Daniel and Helen retreated down the hall. Eddy glare-pinned Sean to the couch. As if he were going to eavesdrop again. As if he’d have had time to get set up. Two minutes after leaving, Daniel came back into the common room, and Sean heard Helen walking downstairs.

  “My father,” Daniel said. He took a deep breath. “Dr. Bremerton, the geneticist I told you about? My father wants him to come to Arkham and make sure Geldman knows what he’s doing.”

  Questioning Geldman’s magic was like asking Everest to prove it was a mountain. “Hasn’t your dad seen you since the treatments?” Sean said.

  “Plenty of times. He’s being an asshole.”

  “Kind of,” Eddy said. “But give him some credit for being worried about you, Daniel.”

  “Maybe I would if he wasn’t such an asshole about it. At least Helen’s fixed it so it’s not totally obvious my father’s checking up on Geldman. There’s going to be a meeting tomorrow night, her and Marvell and Dr. Bremerton and Geldman. Just to get everybody up to date, is how she put it to all of them.”

  In Sean’s opinion, Helen had pulled some win out of a losing situation, but Daniel flopped out on the couch, a forearm across his eyes. “I ought to be in on the meeting,” he said. “I told Helen so, too.”

  Eddy moved to the empty recliner instead of the foot of the couch, even though there was still plenty of room for her skinny butt. “What did Helen say to that?”

  “No.”

  “Just no?”

  “She said if I was there, people couldn’t speak freely. So instead they get to talk behind my back and then not tell me shit.”

  “You think they’re hiding som
ething from you?” Sean said.

  “I know my father and Dr. Bremerton are. Helen, too, probably. I can’t tell with Marvell and Geldman. It’s like, their mental wards are too strong for me to get through.”

  Eddy paled, and her voice sharpened: “What do you mean, you can’t get through mental wards?”

  Daniel rolled over, putting his back to them both. A few seconds later, he rolled flat, arms by his sides. “Sean,” he said. “You asked how Mr. Haddock could tell I was a Changer.”

  “Right.”

  “Deep Ones live underwater, so how do they talk to each other?”

  “Like whales, singing?”

  “Partly. They’re also telepaths. Mr. Haddock knew what I was by reading my mind.”

  “Could you read his mind back?”

  “Of course he could,” Eddy broke in. Red was creeping up her neck, like mercury rising in a thermometer. “He just said his father and Bremerton and Helen are holding back. To know that, he must be able to read them.” She paused. “And he must be able to read us. We’re not trained paramagicians, like Marvell. We’re not wizards like Geldman.”

  The reestablished calm was shaking at its foundations, and Sean finally got why. “But if Daniel could read people’s minds well enough to know they have secrets, couldn’t he read the secrets, too?”

  Daniel rolled upright. “I’m not fully telepathic yet. It’s more like empathy—I can sense emotions, and I can usually tell if someone’s lying. That’s all.”

  “That’s still a lot, Daniel,” Eddy said. Her voice had frozen to an ice shard. “That’s the second big thing you didn’t tell us.”

  Daniel squirmed before he said, “It’s all one package, Deep Ones, telepathy.”

  “No, and you know it’s not. You’re the one who split them up. And you could have told us you were telepathic—”

  “Empathic,” Sean chipped in desperately.

  Eddy ignored him. “You could have told us about it without even mentioning Deep Ones. You could have just said telepathy was part of your magic.”

  “If I’d told you guys right away, it would’ve scared you off,” Daniel pleaded.