Winter Tide Page 28

  “Sabotaged?” Trumbull went from irritated to livid. “Sabotaged? Fhigrlt Ngwdi’ygl!”

  I pulled Spector aside, not sure if you’re lucky to be sane had been a statement or a threat. Charlie pushed the door open, took in our various expressions, and moved to stand beside me and Spector.

  “It’s a long story,” I told Spector, “But they came close to ‘sabotaging’ the whole campus, and Trumbull stopped them.”

  “Ah.” There was a long pause, then with a sort of weary hopelessness he asked, “Evidence?”

  “None. I’m sorry.”

  “God damn it. Well, he knows damn well all he has is a hunch, so they’re turning everything upside down looking for proof of their supposed saboteur, and they told me point-blank that they didn’t think I’d be much help. It’s obvious he thinks that if he looks everywhere else and doesn’t find anything, he’ll be able to get permission to go after my team directly. Through proper channels this time.”

  “What are they doing now?” asked Audrey.

  “Questioning more people, combing the library collections for something—I don’t know what. Searching faculty offices. They may even go through the student dorms and faculty housing just to prove they’ve been thorough, I don’t know. Eventually they’ll make it over here—and I’m sorry, they may well get permission to question you again.”

  Trumbull grimaced. “I still have to teach a class this morning. Are you all planning to spend the whole day sitting around my house again?” If the question wasn’t hint enough, the glare that accompanied it was.

  “I’d like to head back to Hall for the day,” I said. Audrey nodded vigorously, and there were general murmurs of agreement, even from Neko. “Or will that look too suspicious?” I asked Spector.

  “Everything looks suspicious to them right now,” he said. “Frankly, I’m damned if I’ll sit around waiting for him to get to me. I’ve made all the calls I can, and no one wants to talk with me who wasn’t listening already. Clearing out and letting them make a public mess all on their lonesome … isn’t a great idea, but it’s the best I’ve got. You can explain more about your night on the way.”

  “Where’s Caleb?” I asked belatedly, suddenly worried for him.

  “He never came back to the guest dorm,” said Charlie.

  “We need to pick up Miss Dawson, but…” Spector trailed off. I felt a surge of relief, both at the reminder of where Caleb had likely gone, and at Spector’s apparent understanding.

  “He’ll make it,” I assured him. I closed my eyes and reached through the confluence in Caleb’s direction. It was getting easier. I felt warmth, even breaths, a measure of calm that those of us sleeping here had not been granted. I pushed a little of my still-slowing pulse in his direction, and hoped it would be enough to wake him.

  Spector’s car was meant to fit six in a pinch, and Dawson was our sixth. We drove around the side of Skinner’s house, out of view of the front door. Spector literally looked the other way, and a moment later Caleb ran around the corner. He peered dubiously in the window at the crowded seats. I pushed open the door and leaned out. “Climb on in, brother dear!”

  After some experimentation, we ended up scrambling around so he sat next to Dawson with me on his lap.

  “Why do you guys do that?” asked Dawson.

  “Do what?” asked Caleb. He put the lie to his innocence by ostentatiously ruffling my hair. “Sister dear?”

  I poked him in the ribs.

  “It’s sort of a joke,” he said. He reddened, but his tone turned more serious. “In the camps, some of the guards believed we all married our siblings. Playing along made them look stupid.”

  “And helped convince them that they didn’t want to touch the girls,” I added.

  “I know that sort of joke,” said Dawson. She leaned against him, giving Audrey a hair more space.

  A guard at the side gate made us roll down our windows. He smirked, but nodded to Spector and let us pass. His eyes were restless as he turned back to his watch, and he fidgeted with his cigarette.

  “All right,” said Spector. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.

  “No. But it sounds like I can’t afford not to.”

  I told him about the previous night, glossing over our break-in but making up for it with the details of Barlow’s subterranean sanctuary.

  “You know,” said Spector, “I thought most of their claims about what they could do were parlor tricks. Or just exaggeration.”

  “They send you out to deal with the freaks,” said Caleb. “Do you mean to tell me you didn’t believe in magic?”

  “I believe there are a lot of things about the universe that we don’t understand yet. We’ve seen hints about transdimensional mathematics—some work done right here at Miskatonic—and ESP for almost twenty years now. But a lot of things in the original Innsmouth files were made up whole cloth from malicious rumor. Demon-summoning rituals seemed of a piece.”

  I sighed. “Most of them probably were. But there truly are entities that don’t mean humans well—they don’t mean us harm, either, but their natures are such that they’d need to work hard not to destroy us. They just don’t care. If someone makes a crack, they come through for their own purposes, and the destruction follows.”

  “Ah. But you sent this thing home—or Trumbull did.”

  “As far as I can tell.” I shivered—even thinking about the sound-devouring cold was enough to make the air feel thin around me. I took a deep breath. “I have no idea if Trumbull sent it home, or just elsewhere, but she seemed confident that she’d shut down whatever was pulling it through.”

  “I suppose she’d know more about it than the rest of us.”

  “If she weren’t there, I don’t think we’d be alive now. Depending on how much of that thing there was to come through, I wouldn’t bet on anyone in Morecambe County.”

  Spector’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “I guess that must happen, sometimes. There are enough stories about vanished towns.”

  “I don’t suppose,” I said, “that kind of risk would be enough to get them recalled. Or fired. Or tried for treason.”

  He laughed. It sounded strained. “Even with evidence … it might get them pulled back and given a stern lecture. It might also get them sent off to continue their research under more controlled circumstances. There are people who appreciate that kind of power.”

  “Sure, it’s powerful,” said Audrey. “As long as you don’t mind standing at ground zero while you set it off.”

  “That doesn’t always stop people,” said Spector.

  * * *

  We picked up bagels in Kingsport. Their warmth did a little to suppress my memory of the previous night, and to combat the fatigue that still fogged my mind. The library was just opening as we arrived, and we settled gratefully into our usual spot.

  We were more grateful when Edith Birch brought us, along with the usual stack of Kirill’s notebooks and references, additional texts and notes. The books themselves, as we examined them, appeared fairly pedestrian—several well-known fakes, a few impressively obscure fakes, a sprinkling of works that were legitimate but common. But the notebooks …

  They weren’t anything we’d sought, but they were fascinating. Generations of girls like Audrey, like Mary, even like Sally, had encountered some hint of the art—in Hall’s scant collections, at Miskatonic’s open classes, from boyfriends’ coyly dropped hints—and become obsessed with something outside their permitted knowledge, beyond the strictures that bound them to safety.

  It shouldn’t have shocked me. Charlie had come to me with that same desperation for deeper knowledge, and Audrey too in her own way. But magic and the elder tongues had for so long represented freedom to me because they were a piece of home. They were comfort and safety, even as they offered glimpses of things that could never be comforting or safe. And so it took these dozens of voices—desperate diaries, efforts to reinvent ancient knowledge
from nothing again and again—for me to truly understand that they were stretching outward in desperation while I stretched inward. That there were people, beyond the few I knew, who might actively seek to understand the strange rather than destroy it in revulsion.

  Might even come to its aid, when we were ready. I realized that I was shaking.

  I stood and paced around the table, trying to get my body and emotions back under control. I rubbed my arms against the draft, wondering if last night’s adventure had permanently altered my tolerance for cold. I hoped the effects would fade with time, or with distance.

  “Are you okay?” asked Charlie.

  “Yes.” I forced a smile. “I just thought of something. Not important, just personal.”

  “That’s great,” said Audrey. “I hope you’ll tell us about it when you’re ready, but in the meantime I’ve still got a headache, so…”

  “Sorry,” I said, and sat down. I returned to the notebooks, full of new curiosity about their creators’ lives and thoughts. About whether any of them had caught more than a glimpse. About people who, found at the right time, might have been friends and allies and students. About chances lost.

  And that was Sally, too. And Leroy and Jesse. When they saw me—when Leroy and Sally saw the elders—they might have been scared, might have acted foolishly, but they also saw the proof of their deepest yearnings. If I hadn’t been so frightened myself, if I had seen beyond the elders’ treatment of them as dangerous outsiders, if I had understood, I would have realized that they could never let it lie. Sally and Jesse had broken into the library, had accepted Barlow’s offer of mentorship, because I’d shown them magic—and then given them nothing beyond the demand to keep it a secret.

  I set the journal in my hands aside, and paged through others with less attention as I considered my error and whether there might still be some chance of repairing it. Then a name scrawled inside one cover—at the bottom of the stack, perhaps placed there by Birch through an odd sort of protective instinct—brought me abruptly back to our current troubles.

  Not wanting to hold this alone, I tapped Caleb on the shoulder. He put down his half-accurate primer to see, and his mouth made a little o.

  “What did you find?” asked Spector.

  I held the book up. “The name on this journal is Asenath Waite.”

  “You’ve mentioned her before,” said Audrey. She leaned forward, then winced and rubbed her head.

  I never had gotten around to explaining Asenath to her. I supposed it was time. “Asenath’s name is on the notebook—but it’s her father, Ephraim, who wrote the notes. He was the last perpetrator of body theft tried in Innsmouth. In absentia, of course. The man who shot him, after he jumped bodies again, is in an asylum outside of town. But discovering Ephraim took a long time, and he—as Asenath—went to school here.” I sighed. “I expect someone must have sent her—his—papers here afterward. That librarian who’s been so helpful was a friend of hers. I haven’t wanted to tell her—I don’t see that it would do much good.”

  Audrey let out a low whistle. “Yeah. I guess—I don’t know. I feel like I’d want to know, but I probably wouldn’t, actually. What’s he have to say, then?”

  I dove into the book, reluctant but feeling a sort of duty. Hall’s librarians took care with personal journals, and there were others in the stack by the same hand—but we soon discovered that Ephraim recorded all but his most innocuous thoughts in a mix of R’lyehn and Enochian, and often supplemented linguistic security with mirror writing and personal shorthand. I was the only one with the skill to make any sense of it.

  Even putting aside his crime, Ephraim Waite was not a credit to our people. He obsessed over the supposed defects of his stolen body, convinced that his every failure reflected the limits of the female brain. His evaluations of his fellow students were crude and dismissive—though beneath that, there were hints that he appreciated their company and drew comfort from it. He even saw a little of their potential, in spite of himself. And he never tried to corrupt them for his own use. As I read further, I discovered such reluctance was far from his universal habit.

  Ephraim knew that the Yith carried out their tasks with the aid of scattered cults, whose service they repaid with tidbits of knowledge. Not having so remarkable a mission to spark loyalty, he bought his own worshippers not only with carefully tailored scraps of esoterica, but with the assurance that their basest urges were the will of the gods.

  I swallowed nausea and suppressed another shiver—and almost glossed past a line in his description of a group working in the outskirts of New York City:

  Volkov, a strong and ambitious man, could make a good high priest. V. eager to learn the arts, though perhaps too independent-minded. He hopes to return home when the current troubles pass, assuming they ever do. He constantly reminds me that his name means “wolf” in his native Russian. Must find some way to remind him that wolves are pack creatures—and make a dog of him.

  I nearly spoke up immediately, but restrained my tongue. The implications were obvious, but what I should do about them was not. Here was a Russian who might well have brought the rituals of body theft back to Moscow—perhaps to buy immunity from his country’s “troubles.” If this was the Russians’ key to learning that art, it had been taken long ago, long enough that Barlow’s searches for a spy on campus became absurd. And knowing the danger’s source might make it easier for Spector’s people to watch for intruders. At the least, they could make it more difficult for any one person to do great damage.

  And Spector trusted me, had brought me here because whatever our political differences, he believed I’d let him know about any true danger.

  But if we had clear evidence that the Russians had gained the art, all the more cause for Barlow and his masters to desire it for themselves. Another argument for their views, at the expense of Spector’s moderate faction. Even Spector might be persuaded that the research was a necessary evil. And if the Russians truly had learned from one of my people, however apostate, it would be held against us.

  Words spoken cannot be effaced, but silence can always be filled. I wanted to think this through before I said anything. I turned the page, read on of unrelated outrages.

  As I read of a particularly heretical ritual performed in the wilds of New Hampshire, another bout of shivers wracked my body. This time, when I wrapped my arms around myself, I found the spot of deeper cold on my forearm.

  I stilled. For the first time that day, I attended to the source of my fear rather than trying to suppress it. And found, at the other end of the link wrought by my grandfather, a mind fighting for focus and trying desperately to ignore the germ of ice growing in its depths. A flash: Barlow pacing his office while Peters stood by the window and Jesse read aloud to Mary, and I—Sally—tried to focus on taking notes from Mary’s dictation. The words faded in and out; I struggled to fill in the gaps. They already believed I was stupid and hysterical; they’d kick me out if I couldn’t be useful.

  “Audrey!” I said.

  She looked up and glared. “What?”

  As gently as I could, I asked: “Your headache—has it changed at all?”

  “I wish it had. I’m trying to concentrate.”

  The others looked up, caught by my urgency. I went on: “Is it cold?”

  “It feels like I’ve got frostbite on the inside of my skull.”

  I put down the book and stood. My chair scraped against the floor, and Audrey winced. “We have to go back to Miskatonic. Now.”

  Spector was already standing, gathering his notes. “Tell us.”

  “Trumbull’s banishment wasn’t complete. There’s a piece of that creature stuck in Miss Ward’s mind—and maybe in yours too, Audrey. I’m sorry.”

  Audrey swallowed visibly. “We’d better get her to finish her work, then.” She touched her head, brought her hand down to examine as if expecting it stained by frost or blood. “What will it do?”

  “I don’t know.” I helped Charlie up.
“But I doubt it’s just going to lie there.”

  “Me too.” She took a deep breath. “I haven’t just been snapping because of the pain. Something feels … it feels like I’m supposed to be angry.”

  Audrey was one of the strongest people I knew, determined in the pursuit of her goals, able to push through all manner of attempts to control her—but it was likely that her ancestor’s experimental whim had left her vulnerable in peculiar corners. If my neglect had pushed Sally and Jesse into an alliance with Barlow—had led directly to last night’s mad risks—then this contagion, too, was on my hands.

  We stepped outside and found the weather grown fierce. While we huddled in Hall’s illusion of safety, storm clouds had begun to disgorge sleet; it blew into our faces on a biting wind. We traveled as swiftly as Spector dared drive.

  CHAPTER 25

  The gate guards looked preoccupied as we approached. At first I thought them simply inconvenienced by the storm, but as we drew closer I saw by their emphatic gestures that they were arguing with someone. Thinking of people likely to carry on arguments in the middle of a blizzard, I hoped it was Trumbull. It was urgent that we find her as swiftly as possible—and then Sally. We pulled alongside.

  Spector rolled down his window and asked, “Boys, what seems to be the trouble?”

  One of the guards turned, started to answer. He was interrupted by the figure in a heavy coat who pulled down his scarf to reveal himself, disappointingly, as Dean Skinner.

  “Miss Dawson,” he said. “You’re back, good.” He frowned, looking perturbed by her spot in the back seat, well-surrounded. But he moved on to Spector. “You—can’t you do anything about these imbeciles?”

  “They’re not my imbeciles,” said Spector. “Didn’t you invite them to campus?”

  “I cooperated—same as I did with you and your…” He trailed off, barely sparing a grimace of distaste for me and Caleb. “But you haven’t fabricated reasons to shut down the library, or started interrogating everyone in my program! I want them out!”