Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

FROM CABINET 34, DRAWER 6

by

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

5:46 P.M.

THE OLD THEATRE on Asylum Street smells like stale popcorn and the spilled soft drinks that have soured on the sticky floors, and the woman sitting in the very back row, the woman with the cardboard box open in her lap, shuts her eyes. A precious few seconds free of the ridiculous things on the screen, just the theatre stink and the movie sounds—a scream and a splash, a gunshot—and then the man coughs again. Thin man in his navy-blue fedora and his threadbare gabardine jacket, the man with the name that sounds like an ice-cream flavour, and when she opens her eyes he’s still sitting there in the row in front of her, looking at her expectantly over the back of his seat. The screen becomes a vast rectangular halo about his head, a hundred thousand shades of grey, and “Well,” he says, “there you have it.”

“I don’t know what I’m seeing any more,” she says and he nods his head very slowly, up and down, up and down, like a small, pale thing on the sea, and she looks up at the screen again.

The man in the rubber monster suit, the flicker, the soft, insectile flutter from the projector in the booth above her head.

“Just an old movie,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says knowingly, not bothering to whisper because there’s no one else is in the theatre but the two of them, him and her, the skinny, antique man and the bookish woman with her cardboard box. “A silly old movie to scare children at Saturday afternoon matinees, to scare teenage girls—”

“Is that what it is? Is that the truth?”

“The truth,” he says, smiles a tired sort of a smile and coughs again. A handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his thin lips clean, and then the man with the ice-cream name stares for a moment into his own spit and phlegm caught in folds of linen as though they were tea leaves and he could read the future there.

“Yes, I suppose that’s what you would call it,” he tells her, stuffing the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “You would call it that until something better comes along.”

On screen, a cavern beneath the black Amazonian lake, glycerine mist and rifle smoke, and the creature’s gills rise and fall, struggling for breath; its bulging eyes are as blank and empty as the glass eyes of a taxidermied fish.

“It’s almost over,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “Are you staying for the end?”

“I might talk,” the woman whispers, even though they are alone, and the creature roars, its plated, scaly flesh torn by bullets, by knives and spears; rivulets of dark blood leak from its latex hide, and the old man nods his head again.

“You might. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Would someone try to stop me?”

“Someone already has, Miss Morrow.”

And now it’s her turn to nod, and she looks away from the movie screen, the man in the latex suit’s big death scene up there, the creature drifting limp and lifeless to the bottom of its lonely, weedy lagoon. Lacey Morrow looks down at the box in her lap, and If I’d never found the goddamned thing, she thinks, if someone else had found it instead of me. All the things she would give away for that to be true, years or memories, her life if she could die without knowing the things she knows now.

“Well, there it is,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says again and the last frames flicker past before the screen goes white and the red velvet curtain comes down and the house lights come up. “Not quite as silly as I remember. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon.”

“Will they mind if I sit here a little longer?” she asks and he shrugs his thin shoulders, stands and straightens the lapels of his jacket, fusses with the collar of his shirt.

“No,” he says. “I shouldn’t think they’d mind at all.”

She doesn’t watch him leave, keeps her eyes fixed on the box, and his shoes make small, uneven sounds against the sticky floor.

1:30 P.M.

Waking from an uneasy dream of childhood, a seashore and her sisters and something hanging in the sky, something terrible that she wouldn’t look at no matter what they promised her. Lacey blinks and squints through the streaky train window at the Connecticut countryside rushing by, surely Connecticut by now, probably somewhere well past Springfield and headed for Hartford. Crazy quilt of fields and pasture land stitched together with October leaves, the fiery boughs of birch and beech and hickory to clothe red Jurassic sandstone, and then she catches sight of the winding, silver-grey ribbon of the river to the west, flashing bright beneath the morning sun. She rubs her eyes, blinks at all that sunlight and wishes that she hadn’t dozed off. But trains almost always lull her to sleep, sooner or later, the steady, heartbeat rhythm of the wheels against the rails, steel-on-steel lullaby, and the more random rattle and clatter of the couplings for punctuation.

She checks to see that the cardboard box is still there on the empty aisle seat beside her, that her satchel is still stowed safely at her feet, and, reassured, Lacey glances quickly about the car, slightly embarrassed at having fallen asleep. That strangers have been watching her sleep and she might have snored or drooled or mumbled foolish things in her dreams, but the car is mostly empty, anyway—a teenage girl reading a paperback, a priest reading a newspaper—and she looks back to the window, her nightmare already fading in the warmth of the day. They’re closer to the river now, and she can see a small boat—a fishing boat, perhaps—cutting a V-shaped wake on the water.

“Have yourself a nice little nap, then?” and Lacey turns, startled, clipping the corner of the box with her elbow and it almost tumbles to the floor before she can catch it. There’s a woman in the seat directly behind her, someone she hadn’t noticed only a moment before, painfully thin woman with tangled, oyster-white hair, neither very old nor very young, and she’s staring at Lacey with watery blue eyes that seem to bulge slightly, intently, from their sockets. Her skin is dry and sallow, and there’s a sickly, jaundiced tint to her cheeks. She’s wearing a dingy black raincoat and a heavy sweater underneath, wool the colour of instant oatmeal, and her nubby fingernails are painted an incongruous flamingo pink.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the woman says in her deliberate, gravel-voice, and Lacey shakes her head no, “No, it’s okay. I guess I’m not quite awake, that’s all.”

“I was starting to think I’d have to wake you up myself,” the woman says impatiently, still staring. “I’m only going as far as Hartford. I don’t have the time to go any farther than that.” As she talks, Lacey has begun to notice a very faint, fishy smell, fish or low-tide mud flats, brine and silt and stranded, suffocating sea creatures. The odour seems to be coming from the white-haired woman, her breath or her clothes, and Lacey pretends not to notice.

“You’re sitting there thinking, ‘Who’s this lunatic?’ ain’t you? ‘Who’s this deranged woman and how can I get her to shut the hell up and leave me alone?’”

“No, I just don’t—”

“Oh, yes you are,” the woman says and she jabs an index finger at Lacey, candy-pink polish and her knuckles like dirty, old tree roots. “But that’s okay. You don’t know me from Adam. You aren’t supposed to know me, Miss Morrow.”

Lacey glances at the other passengers, the girl and the priest. Neither of them are looking her way, still busy with their reading, and if they’ve even noticed the white-haired woman they’re pretending that they haven’t. Not like she’s their problem, and Lacey says a silent, agnostic’s prayer that it isn’t much farther to the Hartford station; she smiles and the woman makes a face like she’s been insulted.

“It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight. I’m sticking my neck out, just talking to you.”

“I’m very sorry,” Lacey says, trying hard to sound sorry instead of nervous, instead of annoyed. “But I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Me, I’m nothing but a messenger. A courier,” the woman replies, lowering her voice almost to a whisper and glaring suspiciously towards the other two passengers. “Of course, that wouldn’t make much difference, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

“Well, you got the box right there,” the woman says and now she’s pointing over the back of Lacey’s seat at the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil packed inside. “That makes you a courier, too. Hell, that almost makes you a goddamn holy prophet on Judgement Day. But you probably haven’t thought of it that way, have you?”

“Maybe it would be better if we talked later,” Lacey whispers, playing along, and the woman’s probably perfectly harmless, but she puts one hand protectively on the box, anyway. “They might be listening,” she says and nods her head towards the teenager and the priest. “They might hear something we don’t want them to hear.”

The woman makes an angry, hissing sound between her yellow teeth and runs the long fingers of her left hand quickly through her tangled white hair, slicking it back against her scalp, pulling a few strands loose and they lie like pearly threads on the shoulder of her black raincoat.

“You think you got it all figured out, don’t you?” she growls. “Put some fancy letters after your name and you don’t need to listen to anybody or anything, ain’t that right? Can’t nobody tell you no different, cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom, pole to pole—”

“Calm down, please,” Lacey says, glancing towards the other passengers again, wishing one of them would look up so she could get their attention. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to call the conductor. Don’t make me do that.”

“Goddamn stuck-up dyke,” the woman snarls and she spits on the floor, turns her head and stares furiously out the window with her bulging blue eyes. “You think I’m crazy. Jesus, you just wait till you come out the other side and then let’s see what the hell you think sane looks like.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Lacey says, standing, reaching for the satchel with her laptop. “Maybe I should just move to another seat.”

“You do that, Miss Morrow. Won’t be no skin off my nose. But you better take this with you,” and the woman’s left hand disappears inside her raincoat, reappears with a large, slightly crumpled manila envelope, and she holds it out to Lacey. “They told me you’d figure it out, so don’t ask me no more questions. I’ve already said too goddamn much as it is.”

Lacey sets her satchel down beside the cardboard box and stares at the envelope for a moment, yellow-brown paper and what looks like a grease stain at one corner.

“Well, go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you,” the white-haired woman sneers, not taking her eyes off the window, the farms and houses and “Maybe if you take it,” she says, “the crazy woman will leave you alone.”

Lacey snatches the envelope, hastily gathers her things, the satchel and the box, and moves quickly up the centre aisle towards the front of the car. The priest and the girl don’t even look up as she passes them. Maybe they don’t see me at all, she thinks. Maybe they haven’t heard a thing. The door to the next car is stuck and she’s wrestling with the handle when the train lurches, sways suddenly to one side, and she almost drops the box, imagines the fossil inside shattering into a hundred pieces.

Stupid girl, stupid silly girl.

And she forces herself to be still, then, presses her forehead against the cool, aluminium door. She takes a deep breath of air that doesn’t smell like dead fish, that only smells like diesel fumes and disinfectant, perfectly ordinary train smells, comforting familiarity, and the cadence of the rails is the most reassuring sound in the world.

Go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you, the whitehaired woman said, nothing at all but a crazy lady that someone ought to be watching out for, not letting her ride about on trains harassing people. Lacey looks down at the grease-stained envelope in her hand, held tenuously between her right thumb and forefinger.

“Do you need me to help you with that?” and it’s only the priest, scowling up at her from his newspaper; he sighs a loud, irritated sigh and points at the exit. “Would you like me to get the door for you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you, Father. I’d really appreciate it. My hands are full.”

Lacey glances anxiously past him towards the back of the car, and there’s no sign of the white-haired woman now, but the door at the other end is standing wide open.

“There,” the priest says and she smiles and thanks him again.

“No problem,” he says, and as she steps into the short, connecting corridor, he continues speaking in low, conspiratorial tones, “But don’t wait too long to have a look at what’s in that envelope she gave you. There may not be much time left.” Then the door slides shut again and Lacey turns and runs to the crowded refuge of the next car.

* * *

Her twenty-fifth birthday, the stormy day in early July when Lacey Morrow found the Innsmouth fossil, working late and alone in the basement of the Pratt Museum. Almost everyone else gone home already, but nothing unusual about that. Lacey pouring over the contents of Cabinet 34, drawers of Devonian fishes collected from Blossburg, Pennsylvania and Chaleur Bay, Quebec, slabs of shale and sandstone the dusky colour of charcoal, the colour of cinnamon; ancient lungfish and the last of the jawless ostracoderms, lobe-finned Eusthenopteron and the boxy, armour plates of the antiarch Bothriolepis. Relics of an age come and gone hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, a time when the earliest forests lined the shores of lakes and rivers teeming with strange and monstrous fish, and vertebrates had begun to take their first clumsy steps onto dry land. And that transition her sole, consuming obsession since Lacey was an undergraduate, that alchemy of flesh and bone—fins to feet, gills to lungs—the puzzles that filled her days and nights, that filled her dreams. Her last girlfriend walking out because she’d finally had enough of Lacey’s all-night kitchen dissections, the meticulously mutilated sea bass and cod, eels and small sharks sliced up and left lying about until she found time to finish her notes and sketches. Dead things in plastic bags crammed into the freezer and the ice cubes starting to taste more like bad sushi, their Hitchcock Road apartment stinking of formalin and fish markets.

“If I grow fucking scales maybe I’ll give you a call sometime,” Julie growled, hauling her boxes of clothes and CDs from their front porch to the back of her banged-up little Honda. “If I ever meet up with a goddamn mermaid, I’ll be sure to give her your number.”

Lacey watched her drive away, feeling less than she knew she ought to feel, wishing she would cry because any normal person would cry, would at least be angry with herself or with Julie. But the tears never came, nor the anger, and after that she figured it was better to leave romantic entanglements for some later stage in her life, some faraway day when she could spare a spark of passion for anything except her studies. She kept a picture of Julie in a pewter frame beside her bed, though, so she could still pretend, from time to time, when she felt alone, when she awoke in the middle of the night and there was nothing but the sound of rain on the roof and the wind blowing cold through the streets of Amherst.

But that August afternoon she wasn’t lonely, not with the tall rows of battleship-grey steel cabinets and their stony treasures stacked neatly around her, all the company she needed and no thoughts but the precise numbers from her digital callipers—the heights and widths of pelvic girdles and scapulocoracoids, relative lengths of pectoral fins and radials. 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, hmmm?” 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 centre 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 Harbour, Essex Co., Mass. ?Devonian. But there was no catalogue 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, and 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, stared at the tips of her own trembling fingers and the petrified bones resting in a bed of excelsior. They were 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, and “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; 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 centres 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 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 since she 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 shed left her umbrella in her apartment.

1:49 P.M.

Sitting next to a woman who smells like wintergreen candy and mothballs, the steady clackclackclack of razorwheels against the rails, and 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 moustache 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 Universal-International—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 endeavours. I am enclosing some 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 theatres.”

“I don’t go to theatres, 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. Damn it, Lacey, it should almost taste good.”

More than three months 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, moulded plaster walls hidden behind solid oak shelves stuffed with dustwashed books and fossils and all the careful clutter of an academic’s life. A geologic map of Massachusetts framed and hanging slightly askew. 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 accepted by the journal Nature, Dr. Morgan arranged for the press conference at Yale, where she would sit in the shadow of Rudolph Zallinger’s mural 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,” and Jasper Morgan leans back in his creaky, wooden chair, takes the pipe from his mouth and stares intently into the smouldering bowl. Like a gypsy with her polished crystal ball, old man with his glowing cinders, and “‘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.’ 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 any more.”

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

“Dr. Hanisak still thinks 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 palaeontologist slips his pipe back between his ivory-yellow teeth.

“Grendelonyx innsmouthensis,” Lacey whispers, and it does taste good, the syllables 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 realised 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 and the CD with all the slides for the 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 in this box, her box of wonders, and “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 ’30s. 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. 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 the 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 tyre on the Cambridge Turnpike, a flat tyre and a flat spare, and 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. All the rocks around the Cape are igneous and—”

“What’s that mean, ‘igneous’?” he interrupts, pronouncing the last word suspiciously, 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. It was 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 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 Harbour, that’s all.”

“Ain’t much left to see,” he said. “When I was a kid, back in the ’50s, 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.”

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

“Anytime 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, 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. And they are, one on each side of the aisle like mismatched gargoyle bookends. Ten minutes or so since she first noticed them back there, the priest with his newspaper folded and tucked beneath one arm and the oysterhaired woman staring at the floor and mumbling quietly to herself. The priest makes eye contact with Lacey and she turns away, looks 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, but nods her head yes.

“Thanks. 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.

“I’ll only be a moment,” Lacey says.

“You can leave that here, too, if you like,” the woman who smells like wintergreen and mothballs says and Lacey realises that she’s still holding the box with the Innsmouth fossil.

“No. I’ll be right back,” Lacey tells her, gripping the box a little more tightly, and before the woman can say anything else, before the priest has a chance to change his mind and let the oyster-haired woman come after her, Lacey turns and pushes her way along the aisle towards the exit sign.

“Excuse me,” she says, repeated like a prayer, a hasty mantra as she squeezes past impatient, unhelpful men and women. She accidentally steps on someone’s foot and he tells her to slow the fuck down, just wait her turn, what the fuck’s wrong with her, anyway. Then she’s past the last of them and moving quickly down the steps, out of the train and standing safe on the wide and crowded platform. Glancing back at the tinted windows, she doesn’t see the priest or the crazy woman who gave her the envelope. Lacey asks a porter pulling an empty luggage rack where she can find a pay phone and he points to the Amtrak terminal.

“Right through there,” he says, “on your left, by the rest rooms.” She thanks him and walks quickly across the platform towards the doors, the wide, electric doors sliding open and closed, spitting some people out and swallowing others whole.

“Miss Morrow!” the priest shouts, his voice small above the muttering crowd. “Please, wait! You don’t understand!”

But Lacey doesn’t wait, only a few more feet to the wide terminal doors and never mind the damned pay phones, she can always call Jasper Morgan after she finds a security guard or a cop.

“Please!” the priest shouts, and the wide doors slide open again.

It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight.

“You’ll have to come with us now,” a tall, pale man in a black suit and black sunglasses says as he steps through the doors onto the platform and the sun shines like broken diamonds off the barrel of the pistol in his left hand and the badge in his right. Lacey turns to run, but there’s already someone there to stop her, a black woman almost as tall as the pale man with the gun. “You’ll only make it worse on yourself,” she says in a thick Caribbean accent, and Lacey looks back towards the train, desperately searching the crowd for the priest, and there’s no sign of him anywhere.

* * *

After the gas station, Lacey followed Highway 1 south to Kent Corner and from there she took Haverhill Street to the 1A, gradually working her way south and east, winding towards Ipswich and the sea. The sky beaten black and blue by the storms and the day dissolving slowly into a premature North Shore night while lightning fingers flicked greedily across the land. At Ipswich, she asked directions again, this time from a girl working behind the counter of a convenience store. The girl had heard of Innsmouth, though she’d never seen the place for herself, had only picked up stories at school and from her parents—urban legends mostly, wild tales of witches and sea monsters and strange lights floating above the dunes. She sold Lacey a Diet Coke and a bag of Fritos and told her to take Argilla Road out of town and stay on it all the way down to the river. “Be careful,” the girl said worriedly and Lacey smiled and promised that she would.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I just want to have a quick look around.”

And twenty minutes later she reached the dead end of Argilla Road, a locked gate and chain-link fence crowned with loops of razor wire, stretching east and west as far as she could see. A rusty Army Corps of Engineers sign hung on the gate, NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED AND THIS AREA PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS—DO NOT ENTER. She parked the Jeep in a sandy spot near the fence and sat for a few minutes staring at the sign, wondering how many years it had been there, how many decades, before she cut the engine and got out. The wind smelled like rain and the sea, ozone and the fainter, silty stink of the salt marshes, commingled smells of life and sex and death; she sat on the cooling hood of the car with a folded topographic map and finished the bag of Fritos. Below her the land dropped quickly away to stunted trees, billowing swells of goldenrod and spike grass, and a few stingy outcroppings of granite poking up here and there through the sand. The Manuxet River snaked along the bottom of the valley, wandering through thickets of bullrush and silverweed, tumbling over a few low falls on its way down to the mouth of Ipswich Bay.

But there was no indication that there had ever been a town of any sort here, certainly no evidence that this deserted stretch of coastline had once been the prosperous seaport of Innsmouth, with its mills and factories, a gold refinery and bustling waterfront, its history stretching back to the mid-17th century. So maybe she was in the wrong place after all. Maybe the ruins of Innsmouth lay somewhere farther east, or back towards Plum Island. Lacey watched two seagulls struggling against the wind, raucous grey-white smudges drifting in the low indigo sky. She glanced at the topo map and then northwest towards a point marked castle hill, but there was no castle there now, if indeed there ever had been, no buildings of any sort, only a place where the land rose up one last time before ending in a weathered string of steep granite cliffs.

She’d drawn a small red circle on the map just offshore, to indicate the co-ordinates written on the lid of the old box from Cabinet 34— Latitude 42° 40″ N, Longitude 70° 43″ W—and Lacey scanned the horizon, wishing she’d remembered her binoculars, hanging useless in her bedroom closet at home. But there was something out there, a thin, dark line a mile or more beyond the breakwater, barely visible above the stormy sea. Perhaps only her imagination—something she needed to see—or a trick of the fading light, or both, and she glanced back down at the map. Not far from her red circle were contour lines indicating a high, narrow shoal hiding beneath the water and the spot was labelled simply ALLEN’S REEF. If the tide were out and the ocean calm, maybe there would be more to see, perhaps an aplitic or pegmatitic dike cutting through the native granite, an ancient river of magma frozen, crystallised, scrubbed smooth by the waves.

“What do you think you’ll find out there?” Jasper Morgan had asked her the day before. He’d come by her office with the results of a microfossil analysis of the sediment sample she’d scraped from the Innsmouth fossil. “There sure as hell aren’t any Devonian rocks on Cape Ann,” he’d said. “It’s all Ordovician, and igneous, to boot.”

“I just want to see it,” she’d replied, skimming the letter typed on Harvard stationary, describing the results of the analysis.

“So, what does it say?” Dr. Morgan had asked, but Lacey read all the way to the bottom of the page before answering him.

“The rock’s siltstone, but we already knew that. The ostracodes say Early Devonian, probably Lochkovian. And that snail’s definitely Loxonema. So, there you go. Devonian rocks somewhere off Cape Ann.”

“Damn,” he’d whispered, grinning and scratching his head, and they’d spent the next half-hour talking about the thing from Cabinet 34, more than a hundred million years older than anything with a forearm like that had a right to be. No getting around the fact that it looked a lot more like a hand, something built for grasping, than a forefoot, and “Maybe we ought to just put it back in that drawer,” Jasper Morgan had said, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what kind of shit storm this thing’s gonna cause?”

“I think maybe I’m beginning to.”

“You might as well have found a goddamn cell phone buried in an Egyptian pyramid.”

Thunder rumbles somewhere nearby, off towards Rowley, and a few cold drops of rain; Lacey glanced down at the map and then out at the distant black line of Allen’s Reef one last time. Such a long drive to find so little, the whole day wasted, the night and the time it would take her to drive back to Amherst. Money spent on gasoline that could have gone for rent and groceries, and she slid off the hood of the Jeep and was already folding the map closed when something moved out on the reef. The briefest glimpse from the corner of one eye, the impression of something big and dark, scuttling on long legs across the rocks before slipping back into the water. Another thunder clap, then, and this time lightning like God was taking pictures, but she didn’t move, stared at the reef and the angry sea crashing over it.

“Just my imagination,” she whispered. Or maybe it had been a bird, or a particularly high wave falling across the rocks, something perfectly familiar made strange by distance and shadow.

The thunder rolled away and there were no sounds left but the wind blowing through the tall grass and the falls gurgling near the mouth of the Manuxet River. In an instant, the rain became a torrent and her clothes were soaked straight through before she could get back inside the Jeep.

3:25 P.M.

Handcuffs and a blindfold tied too tightly around her face before the man and woman who aren’t FBI agents shoved her into the back of a rust-green Ford van. And now she lies shivering on wet carpeting as they speed along streets that she can’t see. The air around her is as cold as a late December night and thick with the gassy, soursweet stench of something dead, something that should have been buried a long, long time ago.

“I already told you why,” the man in the black suit and sunglasses growls angrily, and Lacey thinks maybe there’s fear in his voice, too. “She didn’t have it, okay? And we couldn’t risk going onto the train after it. Monalisa’s people got to her first. I already fucking told you that.”

And whatever is in the back of the van with her answers him in its ragged, drowning voice like her grandmother dying of pneumonia when Lacey was seven years old. There are almost words in there, broken bits and pieces of words, vowel shards and consonant shrapnel, and the woman with the Caribbean accent curses and mumbles something to herself in French.

“Please,” Lacey begs them. “I don’t know what you want. Tell me what the fuck you want and I’ll give it to you.”

“You think so?” the woman asks. “You think it would be that easy now? After all this shit and you just gonna hand it over and we just gonna go away and leave you alone? Merde...”

The van squeals around a corner without bothering to slow down and Lacey is thrown sideways into something that feels like a pile of wet rags. She tries to roll away from it, but strong hands hold her fast and icy fingers brush slowly across her throat, her chin, her lips. Skin like sandpaper and Jell-O, fingertips that may as well be icicles, and she bites at them but her teeth close on nothing at all, a mouthful of frigid air that tastes like raw fish and spoiled vegetables.

“We had strict fucking instructions to avoid a confrontation,” the man says and the car takes another corner, pitching Lacey free of the rag pile again.

“You just shut up and drive this damn car,” the woman says. “You gonna get us all killed. You gonna have the cops on us—”

“Then you better tell that slimy motherfucker back there to shut the hell up and stop threatening me,” the man growls at the woman. “I’m just about ready to say fuck you and him both. Pop a fucking cap in his skull and take my chances with the Order.”

The rag pile gurgles and then makes a hollow, gulping noise. Lacey thinks it’s laughing, as close as it can ever come to laughing, and she wonders how long it’s going to be before it touches her again, wonders if they’ll kill her first, and which would be worse.

“Yeah, this is sure some real goddamn funny shit,” the man grumbles.

Lacey presses her face against the soggy carpeting, eyes open but nothing there to see, rough fabric against her eyeballs, and she tries to wipe its touch from her skin. Nothing she’ll ever be able to scrub off, though, she knows that, something that’s stained straight through to her soul.

“Is it the fossil?” she asks. “Is this about the goddamn fossil?”

“Now you startin’ to use that big ol’ brain of yours, missy,” the woman says. “You tell us where it’s hid, who you gave it to, and maybe you gonna get to live just a little bit longer.”

“She ain’t gonna tell you jack shit,” the man sneers.

The rag pile makes a fluttering, anxious sound, and Lacey tries to sit up, but the van swerves and bounces over something, a pothole or a speed bump, a fucking old lady crossing the street for all she knows, and she tumbles over on her face again.

“It’s in the box,” she snarls, rolling onto her back and she kicks out with her left foot and hits nothing but the metal side wall. The rag pile gurgles and sputters wildly and so Lacey kicks the van again, harder than before. “Haven’t you even opened the goddamn box?”

“Bitch, ain’t nothin’ we want in that box,” the woman says. “You already handed it off to Monalisa, didn’t you?”

“Of course she fucking gave it to him. Jesus, what the fuck else do you think she did with it?”

“I told you to shut up and drive.”

“Fuck you,” and then a car horn blares and everything dissolves into the banshee wail of squealing brakes, tyres burning themselves down to naked, steelbelt bones, the impact hardly half a heartbeat later, and Lacey is thrown backwards into the gurgling rag pile. Something soft, at least, she thinks, wondering if she’s dead already and just hasn’t figured it all out yet, and the man in the sunglasses screams like a woman.

And there’s light, a flood of clean, warm sunlight across her face before the gunfire—three shots—blam, blam, blam. The rag pile abruptly stops gurgling and someone takes her by the arm, someone pulling her out of the van, out of hell and back into the world again.

“I can’t see,” she says, and the blindfold falls away to leave her squinting and blinking at the rough brick walls of an alleyway, a sagging fire escape, the stink of a garbage dumpster but even that smells good after the van.

“Wow,” the old man says, grinning scarecrow of an old man in a blue fedora and a shiny, gabardine suit, blue bow tie to match his hat. “I saw someone do that in a movie once. I never imagined it would actually work.”

There’s a huge revolver clutched in his bony right hand, the blindfold dangling from the fingers of his left, and his violet-grey eyes sparkle like amethysts and spring water.

“Professor Solomon Monalisa, at your service,” he says, lets the blindfold fall to the ground and holds one twig-thin hand out to Lacey. “You had us all worried, Miss Morrow. You shouldn’t have run like that.”

Lacey stares at his outstretched hand, and there are sirens now.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about the handcuffs. I’m afraid we’ll have to attend to those elsewhere, though. I don’t think we should be here when the police show up and start asking questions, do you?”

“No,” she says, and the old man takes her arm again and starts to lead her away from the wrecked van.

“Wait. The box,” she says and tries to turn around, but he stops her and puts a hand across her eyes.

“What’s back there, Miss Morrow, you don’t want to see it.”

“They have the box. The Innsmouth fossil—”

“I have the fossil,” he says. “And it’s quite safe, I assure you. Come now, Miss Morrow. We don’t have much time.”

And he leads her away from the van, down the long, narrow alley and there’s a door back there, a tall wooden door with peeling red paint and he opens it with a silver key.

EXCERPT FROM

NEW AMERICAN MONSTERS: MORE THAN MYTH?

BY GERALD DURRELL (HILL AND WANG, NEW YORK, 1959]

...which is certainly enough to make us pause and wonder about the possibility of a connection between at least some of these sightings and the celluloid fantasies being churned out by Hollywood film-makers. If we insist upon objectivity and are willing to entertain the notion of unknown animals, we must also, it seems, be equally willing to entertain the possibility that a few of these beasts may exist as much in the realm of the psychologist as that of the biologist. I can think of no better example of what I mean than the strange and frightening reports from Massachusetts proceeding the release of Creature from the Black Lagoon six years ago.

As first reported in the Ipswich Chronicle, March 20th, 1954, there was a flurry of sightings, from Gloucester north to Newburyport, of one or more scaly man-like amphibians, monstrous things that menaced boaters and were blamed for the death of at least one swimmer. On the evening of March 19th, Mrs. Cordelia Eliot of Rowley was walking along the coast near the Annisquam Harbor Lighthouse, when she saw what she later described as a “horrible fishman” paddling about just off shore. She claims to have watched it for half an hour, until the sun set and she lost sight of the creature. Four days later, there was another sighting by two fishermen near the mouth of the Annisquam River, of a “frogman with bulging red eyes and scaly greenish-black skin” wading through the shallows. When one of the men fired a shotgun at it (I haven’t yet concluded if the men routinely carried firearms on fishing trips) it slipped quietly away into deeper water.

But the lion’s share of the sightings that spring seem to have occurred in the vicinity of the “ghost town” of Innsmouth at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (previously known by its Agawam Indian name, Manuxet, a name which still persists among local old-timers). Most of these encounters are merely brief glimpses of scaly man-like creatures, usually seen from a considerable distance, either swimming near the mouth of the river or walking along its muddy banks at low tide. But one remarkable, and disturbing, account, reported by numerous local papers, involves the death of a nine-year-old boy named Lester Sargent, who drowned while swimming with friends below a small waterfall on the lower Castle Neck River. His companions reported that the boy began screaming and a great amount of blood was visible in the water. There were attempts to reach the swimmer, but the would-be rescuers were driven back by “a monster with blood-red eyes and sharp teeth.” The boy finally disappeared beneath the water and his mutilated and badly decomposed body turned up a week later on Crane Beach, a considerable distance from the falls where he disappeared. The Essex County coroner listed the cause of death as shark attack.

“I’ve seen plenty of sharks,” Harold Mowry, one of the swimmers, told reporters. “This wasn’t a shark, I swear. It had hands, with great long claws, and it dragged Lester right down and drowned him.”

Another notable sighting occurred along the old Argilla Road near Ipswich on April 2nd. The Rev. Henry Waite and his wife, Elizabeth, both avid bird watchers, claimed to have observed a “monster” strolling along the east bank of the Castle Neck River for more than an hour, before it dove into the river and vanished in a swirl of bubbles. Mrs. Waite described it as “tall and dark, and it walked a little hunched over. Through the binoculars we could see its face quite plainly. It did have a face, you know, with protruding eyes like a fish, and gills. At one point it turned and seemed to be watching us. I admit I was afraid and asked Henry if we shouldn’t go for the police. Have you ever seen that Monster from the Black Lagoon [sic] movie? Well, that’s what it looked like..”

The last of the sightings were made in early May and no further records of amphibious man-monsters near Cape Ann or Ipswich Bay are available. One report of April 27th claimed that a group of school children had, in fact, found the monster dead, but their discovery later proved to be nothing but the badly decomposed carcass of a basking shark. It is impossible, I think, not to draw connections with the release of the Universal-International horror flick on March 5th. The old bugaboo of “mass hysteria” raises its shaggy head once more...

10.23 A.M.

Late for her meeting with Jasper before the drive to the train station and Lacey rushes upstairs from the collections, is already halfway across the central rotunda of the Pratt Museum’s exhibit hall when Dr. Mary Hanisak calls out her name. Lacey stops and stands in the skeletal shadows of the mammoth and mastodon, the stuffed Indian elephant, and Dr. Hanisak is walking quickly towards her, carrying the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil inside.

“Can you believe you almost forgot this thing?” she asks. “That would have been pretty embarrassing, don’t you think?”

Lacey laughs a little too loudly, her voice echoing in the museum. “Yeah,” she says. “It would have,” and she takes the box from the woman, chubby little Dr. Hanisak like a storybook gnome, Dr. Hanisak whose speciality is the evolution of rodent teeth. The box is wrapped tight with packing tape so there’s no danger of its coming open on the train.

“Then you’re all set now?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be.”

“And you’re sure you want to do this? I mean, it’s awfully high profile. I expect you’ll be in newspapers all over the world when the reporters get a look at what’s in that box. You might even be on CNN. Aren’t you scared?”

Lacey stares for a moment at the dusty bones of a sabre-tooth cat mounted near the mammoth’s feet. “You bet,” she says. “I’m terrified. But maybe it’ll at least bring in some new funding for the museum. We could use it.”

“Perhaps,” Dr. Hanisak replies uncertainly and she folds her hands and stares at the box. “You never can tell how these things will turn out, in the end.”

“I suppose not,” Lacey says, and then she looks at her watch and thanks Dr. Hanisak again. “I really have to get going,” she says and leaves the woman standing alone with the skeletons.

EXCERPT FROM

FAMOUS FILM MONSTERS AND THE MEN WHO MADE THEM

BY BEN BROWNING (THE CITADEL PRESS, SECAUCUS, NJ, 1972]

Certainly there are several interesting stories floating about Hollywood regarding producer William Alland’s inspiration for the story. The one most often repeated, it would seem, recounts how Alland heard a tale during a dinner party at Orson Welles’ home regarding an ancient race of “fish-men” called the dhaghon inhabiting remote portions of the Amazon River. Local natives believed these creatures rose from the depths once a year, after floods, and abducted virgins. Naturally, the person telling the story is said to have sworn to its veracity. Another, less plausible, source of inspiration may have been a tradition in some parts of Massachusetts, in and around Gloucester, of humanoid sea monsters said to haunt a particularly treacherous stretch of coast near Ipswich Bay known appropriately enough as the “Devil’s Reef”. Rumour has it Alland knew of these legends, but decided to change the story’s setting from maritime New England to the Amazon because he preferred a more exotic and primeval locale. At any rate, one or another of these “fish stories” might have stuck with him and become the germ for the project he eventually pitched to Universal.

3:47 P.M.

Through the peeling red door and she follows the old man down long hallways dimly lit by bare, incandescent bulbs, wallpaper shreds, upstairs and downstairs, and finally, a door he opens with another silver key. A steel fire door painted all the uncountable maroon-brown shades of dried gore and butcheries and it swings open slow on ratcreaking hinges, pours the heavy scents of frigid air and formaldehyde at their feet. There’s light in there, crimson light, and Lacey looks at Dr. Solomon Monalisa and he’s smiling a doubtful, furtive smile.

“What am I going to see in there?”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” he says and holds one skinny arm out like a theatre usher leading her to an empty seat.

“I asked you a simple question. All I wanted was a simple answer.”

“Yes, but there are no simple answers, are there?”

“What’s waiting for me in there?”

“All things are but mirrors, Miss Morrow. They reflect our deepest preconceptions, our most cherished prejudices—”

“Never fucking mind,” she says and steps quickly across the threshold into a room as cold as the back of the Ford van. And the room is almost empty, high concrete walls and a concrete ceiling far overhead, banks of darkroom red lights dangling on chains, and the tank, sitting alone in the centre of it all.

“You’re a very lucky woman,” Dr. Monalisa says and the steel door clicks shut behind her. “Have you any idea, my dear, how few scientists have had this privilege? Why, I could count them all on my left hand.”

The tank is at least seven feet tall, sturdy aquarium glass held together with strips of rusted iron, filled with murky preservative gone bloody beneath the lights, and Lacey stares at the thing floating lifeless behind the glass.

“What do you see, Miss Morrow?”

“My god,” she whispers and takes another step towards the tank.

“Now that’s a curious answer.”

Neither man nor fish, neither fish nor amphibian, long legs and longer arms, and its bald, misshapen skull is turned upwards, as if those blind white eyes are gazing longingly towards Heaven. Solomon Monalisa rattles his keys and slips the handcuffs from her aching wrists.

“Grendelonyx innsmouthensis—that’s what I thought you’d see, Miss Morrow. Grendel’s claw—”

“But it’s impossible,” she whispers.

“Quite,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “It is entirely, unquestionably impossible.”

“Is it real?”

“Yes, of course it’s real. Why would I show it to you otherwise.”

Lacey nods her head and crosses the room to stand beside the tank, places one hand flat against the glass. She’s surprised that it isn’t cold to the touch. The creature inside looks pale and soft, but she knows that’s only the work of time and the caustic, preserving chemicals.

“It got tangled in a fishing net, dragged kicking into the light of day,” the old man says and his footsteps are very loud in the concrete room. “Way back in November ’29, not too long after the Navy finished up with Innsmouth. I suspect it was wounded by the torpedoes,” and he points to a deep gash near the thing’s groin. “They kept it in a basement at the university in Arkham for a time, and then it went to Washington. They moved it here right after the war.”

She almost asks him which war, and who “they” are, but she doubts he would tell her, not the truth, anyway, and she can’t take her eyes off the beautiful, terrible, impossible creature in the tank—its splayed hands, the bony webbing between its fingers, the recurved, piercing claws. “Why are you showing me this?” she finally asks instead.

“It seemed a shame not to,” he replies, his smile fading now, and he also touches the aquarium glass. “There are so few who can truly comprehend the...” and he pauses, furrowing his brow. “The wonder—yes, that’s what I mean, the wonder of it all.”

“You said you have the fossil.”

“Oh, yes. We do. I do. Dr. Hanisak was kind enough to switch the boxes for us last night, while you were finishing up at the museum.”

“Dr. Hanisak—”

“Shhhhhh,” and Monalisa holds a wrinkled index finger to his lips. “Let’s not ask too many questions, dear. I assure you, the fossil is safe and sound. I’ll give it back to you very soon. Ah, and we have all your things from the train. You’ll be wanting those back as well, I should think. But I wanted you to see our friend here first, before you see the film.”

“What film?” she asks, remembering the photograph from the manila envelope, the letter, the nosy woman asking her if she liked old monster movies.

“What odd sort of childhood did you have, Miss Morrow? Weren’t you allowed to watch television? Have you truly never seen it?”

“My mother didn’t like us watching television,” Lacey says. “We didn’t even own a TV set. She bought us books, instead. I’ve never cared much for movies. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then that may be the most remarkable part of it all. You may be the only adult in America who’s never seen Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and he chuckles softly to himself.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I should certainly hope so.”

And at last she turns away from the dead thing floating in the tank and looks into Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s sparkling eyes. “You’re not going to kill me?” she asks him.

“Why would I have gone to all the trouble to save you from those thugs back there if I only wanted you dead? They’d surely have seen to that for me, once they figured out you didn’t have the fossil any longer.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Lacey says and realises that she’s started to cry.

“No,” he says. “But you weren’t meant to. No one was. It’s a secret.”

“What about my work—”

“Your article has been withdrawn from Nature. And Dr. Hanisak was good enough to cancel the press conference at the Peabody Museum.”

“And now I’m just supposed to pretend I never saw any of this?”

“No, certainly not. You’re just supposed to keep it to yourself.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Jesus, why don’t you just destroy the fossil? Why don’t you destroy this thing?” and she slaps the glass hard with the palm of her hand. “If it’s a goddamn secret, if no one’s supposed to know, why don’t you get rid of it all?”

“Could you destroy these things?” the old man asks her. “No, I didn’t think so. Haven’t you taken an oath, of sorts, to search for answers, even when the answers are uncomfortable, even when they’re impossible? Well, you see, dear, so have I.”

“It was just lying there in the cabinet. Anyone could have found it. Anyone at all.”

“Indeed. The fossil has been missing for decades. We have no idea how it ever found its way to Amherst. But you will care for it now, yes?”

She doesn’t answer him, because she doesn’t want to say the words out loud, stares through her tears at the creature in the tank.

“Yes, I thought you would. You have an uncommon strength. Come along, Miss Morrow. We should be going now,” he says and takes her hand. “The picture will be starting soon.”

For David J. Schow, Keeper of the Black Lagoon