Winter Tide Page 29

  “Entirely understandable,” said Spector. “I’ll tell my supervisors you said so—and you ought to tell the college board.”

  “It doesn’t bother them—they don’t need to use the library every day, or worry about whether classes are being taught properly. And if you could stop interfering with my professors’ duties, that would help too.” His breath fogged the air in short, angry puffs, quickly dispelled.

  Spector sighed, “I’ll see what I can do.” Window resealed, he said, “That’s something, anyway. Friendliest he’s been since we got here.”

  Dawson’s tone was wry. “If there’s one thing the dean hates more being on a leash, it’s people who slip his leash.”

  Spector took the turn into Trumbull’s drive slowly, and still we skidded a little. I helped Charlie up the walk. Snow burned cold against my skin, and I was shivering violently by the time we got inside. The others, save for Audrey, shed coats and scarves I’d never bothered to put on. She rubbed her temples and grimaced.

  “I hope she’s here,” she said. “I really don’t want to go back outside.”

  Trumbull wasn’t downstairs. “Maybe she’s in the math building,” I said. “But if they’re questioning people, she wouldn’t want to be there at all. Let me check the study.”

  The cold washed over me again halfway up the stairs, and I leaned against the banister until the wave passed. I felt stiff, queasy. Iä, Dagon, remind my body that the cold water is home.

  No response. As ever. I continued upward, seeking the closest thing to a god I’d likely ever get a useful answer from.

  Perhaps it was better for my opinion of the gods that they stayed distant.

  I knocked on the study door. I heard no answer, and considered the relative risks of interrupting Trumbull’s work against the delay of seeking her elsewhere. For once, her preferences were not high among my concerns. I opened the door.

  I stared for a moment, then threw myself to the floor—where Trumbull lay, eyes closed, head propped on a cushion.

  “Charlie! Neko!” I checked for breath, found it slow and even. “Caleb!” Her pulse was regular. At my shout she rolled her head against the slate and murmured words I couldn’t make out.

  Footsteps pounded the stairs, and Caleb and Neko appeared. They crowded through the doorway, Audrey and Spector and Dawson close behind. Charlie’s cane sounded behind them.

  “What happened?” asked Audrey. She, also, knelt to check breath and pulse. “Did it get her, too? Is she fighting it?”

  “No.” I looked up, and took in fully what peripheral awareness had already hinted. The desk had been cleared, the walls stripped of diagrams. The strange machine was gone as well. “I think she went home.”

  “She—that cowardly bitch!” Audrey shoved the sleeping body, and I grabbed her arms.

  “That’s not her,” I said.

  Neko put her hands on Audrey’s shoulders. “Breathe. We’re all monsters here.”

  After a moment Audrey relaxed in my grip, though I could still feel the tension underneath. “Yes. Sorry.” She leaned back, and I released her wrists to grip her hands instead. She gripped back, tightly as any ordinary woman of the air could manage.

  Under our joined hands, whoever now occupied Trumbull’s body moaned. I let go and motioned the others back. She continued to stir; Neko mouthed “water” at me and slipped out.

  Her eyes flickered, and a familiar voice muttered, “Where did I put those notes?”

  Then her eyes flew wide, and she screamed. She scrabbled away from me, and I put up my hands. Needing something to appease her long enough for more complete explanations, I said, “Professor, it’s okay. You fainted, and I found you.” Seeing that the others were now well within her field of vision, I added, a little feebly, “We found you.”

  She took us in and frowned—as I suppose anyone might at finding themselves surrounded by strangers of diverse and dubious aspect. She masked her alarm swiftly, recovering an aplomb worthy of her body’s previous tenant. But when her glance fell on the window she drew a sharp breath, and her whole frame went tense. She stood slowly, walked to the glass with equally careful measure.

  “Why is it snowing?” she asked, as if demanding of a child why broken seashells were strewn about the parlor.

  I looked at the others, but their expressions told me this was my task. “Professor, do you remember where you’ve been for the past six months?”

  “I’ve been here, obviously.” But her hands gripped the sill hard enough to pale the joints.

  “I need to tell you something that’ll be difficult to believe.” I caught my breath as another shiver hit me, thankfully a lesser one. “And I hope you’ll believe me anyway, because we’re in considerable difficulty and you—if you don’t believe me, it’ll make everything harder.”

  “Speak,” she said. Neko returned, handed her a glass of water. She frowned again, but drank and seemed steadier for it.

  I decided to start with the basics, or at least the immediately verifiable. “It’s January 27th, 1949. For the past half a year, another being has inhabited your body—a researcher from another time, another species. You’ll have spent about five years in her body, many aeons in the past. Some memories will eventually come back to you, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever recover most of it. I’m sorry about that.”

  She put the glass down on the desk, stared at its clean surface a long moment. “You’re clearly mad. But it’s also obviously winter. Have I been in some sort of fugue state?” A look of horror passed over her face. “Who’s been teaching my classes?”

  “She has. I mean, it has. The Yith. I don’t gather anyone here knew you enough to tell the difference. Although I’m afraid she may have skipped today’s sessions.”

  She laughed: a looser laugh than Trumbull’s—the other Trumbull’s—supercilious amusement. But there was an edge to it. “Dean Skinner certainly wouldn’t notice a replacement, unless he actually liked the creature. How does this marvelous story explain what you’re all doing in my office?”

  I looked down, and steeled myself for introductions and explanations. But Spector stepped forward and offered his hand. She took it automatically. “Ron Spector. I’m with the FBI—I brought Miss Marsh, Mr. Marsh, Mr. Day, and Miss Koto to Miskatonic for a research project. Knowing the school’s prejudices, I neglected to mention that half of my team were of the female persuasion, and I’m afraid Dean Skinner demanded that your, ah, predecessor play hostess. I can get them into a hotel if you object, though I’d prefer to do so after the storm. Miss Dawson is an employee of Skinner’s who’s been helping us, and Miss Winslow here is a student of Miss Marsh’s who goes to the Hall school.”

  Trumbull eyed his badge. “That’s quite the menagerie. And you believe this nonsense story?”

  “I’ve seen some pretty strong evidence in the past few days, yes.”

  “Professor,” I said. “I’m not an expert in these things myself, but I understand there are theories of multidimensional geometry—you are a specialist in multidimensional geometry, yes?”

  “I most certainly am.” She drew herself up and glared.

  I hastened to add, “I meant, as opposed to being an expert in some other mathematical area. Tr—the woman—the entity, I mean, who was in your body this morning, she also studied multidimensional geometry.”

  “Ah. Yes, there are geometrical proofs that, combined with some extremely dubious branches of psychology and folklore—and a degree of intoxication—suggest the possibility of mental travel through time and space. The men in the department are prone to speculating about such things, but I’ve always considered them fantasies for people who don’t find the math itself sufficiently enthralling.”

  I remembered the painted dreamscape in the living room and wondered how much of her dismissal was cold skepticism—and how much that such ideas, admired as flights of creative theory in the men of the faculty, risked accusations of mysticism in a woman.

  Cold seeped through the windo
w, and I wrapped my arms tightly. I had no fallback from my plan to beg Trumbull’s help, but it felt important to make this Trumbull understand. If nothing else, a multidimensional geometry expert might still be useful. And there was a chance that, buried in her memories, we might find some clue what we ought to do next. “Perhaps—I could show you some of our magic. Not direct proof, but enough to show we’re not making this up out of whole cloth.”

  “I know how stage magic works. I’m not impressed, and I think I want you out of my house.”

  Audrey had been pacing the study’s limited free space like a caged lion. Now she bent to retrieve a sheet of paper from beside the desk. “Here,” she said to Trumbull. “I think she left your schedule.”

  Trumbull plucked it from her grasp. “This is not my handwriting.”

  “I promise you,” said Audrey. “I don’t know the details of your classes.”

  “She left class notes?” asked Caleb. “That’s remarkably thoughtful, by her standards.”

  “What’s all this in the margins?” She held it out, pinched between thumb and forefinger as if it carried some unknown contagion.

  I looked. “It’s Enochian. What kind of species withholds basic calculus until its young near adulthood? Compress section on matrices and insist on a more reasonable pace of learning. That sort of thing. It looks like notes to herself—she must have left the sheet she made for her own reference.”

  “Isn’t Enochian one of those obscure dead tongues they obsess over in the folklore classes?”

  “It may be that,” I said. “It’s also the Yith’s native language. And I use it for liturgical purposes, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  She set the schedule firmly on the desk, and pinned it with the water glass. “If you try to pull a penny out of my ear, I will throw you all out into the storm.”

  I began drawing the diagram. Some time in the last few hours the slate had been washed clean, its previous palimpsest erased. Presumably the cultist who aided Trumbull’s return had wanted to be thorough. “The Inner Sea would be best”—among other things, it was the only ritual I felt adequate to perform right now—“and might even help a little with our problem. At the very least, those of us in the confluence can support each other a little more. It’s risky, though, strengthening our connection under the circumstances…”

  “If I can help, I’ll do it,” said Caleb. Charlie nodded, as did Dawson after a moment of hesitation.

  “Thank you,” I said. I continued drawing, and focused on keeping my hand steady. “I can use Trumbull’s—the other Trumbull’s—alterations to protect the professor.”

  “What do I need protecting from?” Her tone was sharp, but she watched the diagram unfold with interest.

  “As I said, we’re in considerable danger. Last night we had to deal with … it’s hard to explain. Another entity, less comprehensible and less interested in our well-being than the Yith who had your body. It left a piece of itself in Miss Winslow, and in—someone else I’m connected to. I’m afraid this would be difficult to explain all at once, even if you believed me about the basics. But you shouldn’t be at risk from the ritual. Mr. Spector, Neko, if you want to wait downstairs, this shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.”

  “If you think the risk is reasonably small,” said Spector, “I feel like I ought to observe. I’ve read plenty, but I’m beginning to realize how much I’ve missed.”

  I paused my drawing. “Mr. Spector, this is a sacred ritual. You may wait downstairs, or you may participate. You may not stand by the door and take notes.”

  He hesitated. “Does the ritual involve prayer?”

  “To gods foreign to your own? No, it’s not religious. It’s just sacred.”

  He squared his shoulders. “All right, then.”

  Neko hovered in the doorway, and at last stepped in. “Just this once.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “You’ve never wanted to before.”

  “I’ll admit, I’m kind of curious. And I’m already stuck with the trouble.”

  Caleb refilled the salt water. I drew my knife—Yith-Trumbull’s apparently having been removed along with most other overt traces of her presence—and showed our newcomers where to sit and what to do. I started the chant as we each bled into the water. The rhythm of the familiar syllables warmed me, and I tried to pass a little of that warmth down the link to Sally. It was hard not to clutch it close, even knowing her pain for the source of my own.

  There was a taint in the river of my blood, stagnant in the midst of torrent. It glowed and pulsed, never quite there when I tried to examine it directly. Around it the water grew cloudy and slow.

  As I looked more closely I found thin threads, almost invisible, stretching out and away. I examined one, cautiously. It hummed beneath the touch of my mind, and I caught another glimpse of Sally, shivering, trying to concentrate on her note-taking as sound faded in and out. Barlow speaking to me sharply, my twitch of guilt and fear as I tried to focus.

  I could do little about what had already spilled into my blood, but the threads were slender, fragile and finite. I could easily break the spell that my grandfather had set in place. Not only for me—the whole confluence would be safer if we could focus on Audrey alone.

  They said that it was safest to leave me here.

  I let the threads be and joined with the rest of the confluence, already flowing together. Spector and Trumbull and Neko, if I had done my work right, were well isolated. Unless they knew how to reach for us, as the Yith had, they would be safe in their own waters.

  Charlie and Caleb and Dawson suffered only hints of disturbance—here and there amid their streams I winced at a flash of cold. But Audrey’s blood had grown strange. The cold thing had entered her more deeply than me, and burrowed into the soft mud and silt that ought to have been her natural protection. Where the glow pulsed out, something else clustered around it: tiny spots of absolute darkness that absorbed all attempts to perceive detail. They ate at the glow. Not fast enough, for it still swelled and bubbled from the burrows where it had fastened, but they ate. And as they ate, they grew. No more than half of what ran in her veins remained mistakable for ordinary human blood.

  There was a certain hypnotic fascination to it. But I drew back, broadened my focus. I pushed strength into Audrey, and the simple reminder of our presence. Charlie and Caleb and Dawson did the same, and I hoped there was enough that I needn’t feel guilty redirecting a little to Sally.

  The connection persisted as I pulled back to the study. Neko looked relieved when she saw me wake. I ought to have checked first on Trumbull or Spector, but it was my sister’s opinion that my eyes sought.

  “Well,” she said, leaning back on her hands. “I see what the fuss is about.”

  “Going to try it again?” I asked.

  “Maybe someday. Like I said, it’s not what I want to spend all my time on—but I’m glad I tried it. Are you guys okay?”

  “That’s a complicated question,” I said. “Mr. Spector, are you well?”

  “Apparently so.” His brow was furrowed, but he didn’t seem inclined to share and I let him have his privacy.

  Finally I turned to Trumbull. “Well?”

  If her mask had slipped, it was back now. But she said: “All right. Suppose we posit that you’re not as mad as you sound.”

  I shivered. “That’s better than nothing.”

  “Tell me again what’s going on.”

  I summarized the situation as best I could—the outlines of our research, Spector’s colleagues and their dangerous studies, the Yith, the barely-averted disaster that had caused her to flee. The cold that ate at Sally and Audrey.

  “So she returned to her own time … and sent me back here to handle this intruder in her stead?”

  “I don’t think that she—it—expected you to handle it,” I said. “I wish I could say otherwise. The Yith retreat when they think a situation is beyond what they can, or should, deal with. And they’re usually better
equipped than whoever takes their place.”

  Her lips quirked. “Very reassuring.”

  “Could your family help?” Charlie asked me.

  I’d been thinking about that. “I don’t know. But they’re probably our best option right now.” Snow pattered against the window, almost drowned out by the wind that rattled the glass. Snow would cover the sand, wind send the waves surging toward the dune and crashing over Union Reef. But the cold thing wouldn’t wait for the storm’s end. “We need to try and get Miss Ward first. She’s doing worse than any of us.”

  “Who are your family?” asked Professor Trumbull. “Why do you think they can help?”

  I yearned to go back to San Francisco, where I didn’t keep needing to explain myself. “Are you from around here?”

  “I grew up in Kingsport—though I went to Pembroke. I don’t trust people who spend their whole lives in the county, especially professors who’ve never left except to hare off to Antarctica or some such for a few months.”

  “What do you know about Innsmouth?”

  “Aside from it being a ghost town? Rumors that I would have dismissed until a few minutes ago. Are you a hybrid fish monster, then?”

  I sighed. “I’m from an amphibious branch of the human race. I’m not a hybrid anything. We prefer ‘Chyrlid Ajha’ or ‘People of the Water.’ Or ‘Deep Ones,’ though that’s a bit poetic for everyday use. We live a long time, after metamorphosis. Not as long as a Yith, but Archpriest Ngalthr or my grandfather are likely to have a lot more experience with this kind of thing than I do.”

  “Can they help me remember?” There was an urgency in her voice that I hadn’t heard before.

  “I don’t know. But they’ll certainly have worked with people who hosted Yith. They’ll know what can be done, if anything can.”

  She leaned forward. “What do they look like?”

  I blinked; my eyes felt like ice cubes. “My family?”

  “The Yith.”

  “Oh.” I had a picture in the children’s text downstairs. I’d show it to her later. “No one knows what their original bodies looked like. But the one you would have been in … wrinkled, conical forms, about ten feet tall, and moving on a sort of a rippling base. Four limbs coming out of the top, with pincers on two of them, funnels for eating on the third, and the head on another. Three eyes on the head, and tentacles for picking things up. I can show you illustrations.”