Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (53 page)

“Nothing. I heard the name, and I thought… well, I thought Dr. Saltonstall might have planted an impostor.”

She laughed. “He makes me paranoid, too.”

She tried to avoid looking at me directly, but I stared hard at her. Her blue eyes were large and rather protuberant, but not so much as Grandma’s or mine. I saw no hint of extra skin between her fingers, no rash, and certainly no alopecia: her auburn hair was real.

“You don’t look like an Innsmouth person,” I said.

She grimaced. “I’m not. And since they know I’m not, I wonder why the hell I’m still here!”

She had raised her voice for the benefit of the bored server at the counter, but he continued to look bored.

“It’s none of my business—”

“Sure it is, we’re in this together. You’d think if they won’t let me go home, they’d at least let me have a goddamn cigarette, it’s not as if this place is bursting at the seams with people whose lungs I can pollute. Why can’t I go home?”

The last remark, in her flattest, hardest quack, was also addressed to the server, who retreated to the kitchen without comment.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“If you’re not an Innsmouth person—”

“Then why am I here? It’s embarrassing. No, it isn’t, it’s funny, actually. My father looked sort of like you before he….”

“Passed over?”

She seemed startled. “That was what he said he was going to do, that’s the phrase he used. Only he didn’t die, he ran away. I never knew why, but maybe I do now.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t my father, that’s why. They found that out as soon as they took my first blood-test, and then they confirmed it with DNA. My father, Wade Gilman, had Innsmouth parents, but my biological father must’ve been the mailman or somebody. I never even suspected that until they took the blood-test, but maybe my father suspected it long before, and that’s why he left.”

She strove for a light tone, but her voice shook. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bitch. I just came here to get some money for art school in Providence, so they lock me up without cigarettes and tell me my mother was screwing around. Have they put you in the tank yet?”

“What’s that?”

“They truss you up and dump you in a tank full of water to see how long you can hold your breath. They make damn sure you’re not faking, too, they keep you under till you pass out. And they do it again and again. They put me in the tank even after they
knew
I wan’t a Kermie!”

“A what!”

“I’m sorry, that’s not nice, I guess. That’s what they call Smouthies—Innsmouth people, I mean—in Rowley, where I come from. For Kermit the Frog?”

“Why don’t they let you leave?”

“That’s
my
question, Dr. Einstein!” Annoyed by the close scrutiny I had given her, she stared back at me and added coldly: “You’ve got enough problems of your own, I guess.”

“There were some other people—applicants—when you came here, weren’t there?”

“Oh, yeah, this place was really hopping….” She looked as if she wanted to bite her tongue.

“They looked like me, you mean?”

“No, I meant…. Okay, if that’s what you want, they looked like you.” She didn’t like being put on the defensive, and she stopped trying to hide her contempt for me. “It should have been obvious that I didn’t belong.”

“What happened to them?

She shrugged. “One day they were gone. We didn’t become best friends. Nobody said good-bye. I guess they just took their money and hopped away.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“No.” She glanced uneasily toward the counter, but we were still alone. “What’s your point?”

“Maybe they didn’t leave.”

“Huh? Oh, come
on!
You mean they killed them?” Her surprise was overdone. I think she had considered that possibility on her own and was trying to reject it. “But they wouldn’t kill me. I’m not like
them!”

“I guess it was all a terrible mistake,” I said mildly. “They’ll ask you to promise not to tell anybody that they tortured you, or that all the Kermies disappeared, and let you go. Tomorrow, probably.”

“You son of a bitch. Being sarcastic doesn’t help.”

“Do you want to go? Without waiting for them to tidy up all the paperwork, or whatever it is they say they’re doing?”

“Damn. Are you serious? You don’t look exactly like a….”

“A knight in shining armor?”

“A man of action, I was going to say.”

“My looks are deceptive.” This misplaced nitwit had irritated me. Born in an earlier time, she would have egged on the thugs who massacred the detested “Smouthies.” My tone was bitter as I added, “Just think of me as the Frog Prince.”

“Jesus, don’t look at me like that!” She failed to repress a shudder. “I think I believe you.”

The second floor of the wing where my room lay had originally comprised four cavernous wards, but the one on the end had been divided with drywall into thirty cubicles under a false ceiling, each barely large enough to contain a single bed, plastic chair and fiberboard writing-desk, all of them bolted in place to discourage their use as weapons. A reproduction of a bland Matisse seascape was similarly bolted to the brick exterior wall. Mine could be considered a first-class accommodation, I suppose, since it shared one of the old madhouse windows, heavily barred and screened, with an adjoining cubicle. Standing on the chair, I had a view of the gatehouse in the distance and, under the window, most of the parking lot.

The door was the most interesting feature of my cell, for it wouldn’t have met the security standards of a dollhouse. I believed the lock could be spread with one of the long but sloppily-installed bolts I had extracted from Matisse. I hadn’t experimented, though, for fear of marking the door or even splintering it.

Swathed as he was in medical degrees and patrician breeding, I don’t think Dr. Saltonstall ever considered that anyone would mistrust him or try to escape his prison. And if they did, his omnipotent drugs would stop them. Every night I had been given a big red capsule that I dutifully swallowed, and every night it knocked me out within ten minutes. Tonight I concealed it under my tongue until I could spit it out.

I lay quietly in my bed for an hour or so until I heard cars starting up, four in succession. I climbed onto the chair and watched as they drove to the gate and were let through. While I watched, the doctor himself strode across the parking lot to his car and left. Two others followed him within the next ten minutes, leaving only one car. When a fat man in uniform trudged from the gatehouse to the main building carrying a brown bag, I was sure the Facility had now shut down for the night.

The gap between the door and the jamb wasn’t as wide as I’d thought. I couldn’t push the bolt in even when I leaned on it with all my weight. I hesitated to hammer it with the heel of my shoe, but I had no choice. If the guard heard me, I told myself, he would assume I was signalling for help and take his time about responding. I had another bad moment when the cheap bolt I was using as a lever seemed on the verge of bending. Again, I had no choice. I pushed harder. The bolt held and the door sprang open.

I had the freedom of their new, plasterboard corridor, but an insuperable hurdle might remain: the heavy, iron door of the former ward. If they had locked that door—but they hadn’t. This was more of the doctor’s smug faith in drugs, I supposed.

I prowled along the outer corridor, where the only light glowed in an EXIT sign. I heard tinny voices and laughter as I approached the main stairway, where a broad landing overlooked the lobby. The guard I had seen sat at a desk by the front door, watching television and eating a sandwich. It seemed rather melodramatic not to just stroll naturally across the landing, but I tiptoed.

At the end of the next wing I found another ward converted to cubicles, and it seemed likely that this would be the women’s quarters. The first ten doors were unlocked, the rooms empty. When I found the eleventh locked, it seemed likely I would find Ondine Gilman behind it.

This door was just as flimsy as the one on my own cell, and since it opened inward, I believed I could simply kick it open. This worked, but the thunderous crash of the door against the wall made me cringe. I ran to the outer corridor to listen. Minutes passed. I heard nothing except the canned laughter of the television until a human guffaw joined in, testimony that the guard’s attention was fully occupied.

I felt confident enough to snap on the light after I had closed the woman’s door behind me. She didn’t stir.

“Ondine!” I said, and, more loudly, “Miss Gilman!”

Curled on her side, she breathed deeply and evenly. Her breathing didn’t change even when I shook her by the shoulder. I stood considering my options for a moment, then lifted her covers and pushed her green hospital gown above her waist. She continued to sleep soundly even when I peeled her underpants down and extricated her feet.

I wasn’t displeased by what I saw and touched, but I wished I still had my ice-cream truck. An hour in the locker would have done wonders for her superior attitude. I restored everything as it had been except for the panties, indecent, red ones of the sort favored by roadside whores. After using them to wipe the evidence of my visit from her buttocks, I wadded them into my pocket and turned off the light. She continued to breathe evenly.

I was tempted to try the stones for size, but decided she would keep while I explored the Facility.

The stairs marked as an exit led me down to an unguarded rear door. I stepped outside and savored a warm night that was loud with crickets, frogs and… sirens? I strained my ears, but I couldn’t identify the sounds in the distance. They might have been sirens, or even thin screams.

The stairs continued down to the basement, where I knew the medical department was housed. I had been given tests here, but I hadn’t suspected its extent. There was a fully equipped operating theater and other rooms that held machines liberally plastered with radiation warnings.

The last room, and the largest, was obviously a morgue. Nevertheless it was a shock to pull out a drawer and find a naked body. And a second. And a third. And…. They were Innsmouth people, every one of them, and they were dead. I couldn’t say what had killed them, but they had all been stitched up crudely after autopsies.

My knees wobbled, the room swam, and without further warning I found myself throwing up until my stomach clenched down on itself like a hard, painful, empty fist.

My shock and sickness gave way to fury. I raged down the line, pulling out drawer after drawer. Fifteen of them. Twenty! Someone would pay, someone would pay dearly. These were my people, my own unique, precious people, standing even further above Saltonstall and his henchmen than those butchers fancied they stood above worms. Left to evolve in peace, they would have shed their simian traits and passed over into magnificent beings who would have lived for all time in the glorious kingdom of the Lord. But now, denied all hope of transfiguration, they were just so many dead chimps.

“Father Dagon!” I screamed. “Mother Hydra! Where were you!”

I came at last upon a drawer whose contents shocked me into stillness. Those evil savages had succeeded in meddling with something they couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It was the ultimate obscenity, a blasphemy for which no human words exist, and I forced my imperfect tongue to struggle with curses that were more appropriate, but still woefully inadequate to the horror. With drugs, with surgery or radiation, they had forced a Deep One to pass over on dry land.

It was huge, and even in its desiccated state it was beautiful, godlike. My hands fumbled reverently over the dry scales, the pathetically limp crest of spikes that should have stood proud. Sobbing bitterly, I promised a hundred sacrifices, a thousand, a holocaust that would rouse Father Dagon and make the sea rise up to the sky and draw down the moon in its awful wrath.

Stroking the massive chest, I realized that I felt no stitches. I looked closely. I saw no obvious wounds at all. I felt no heartbeat or respiration either, but it was possible, just barely, that he had shut down all his systems hard when faced with the horror of a landlocked metamorphosis. As Grandma was so fond of quoting, “That is not dead which can eternal lie….”

I dashed back to the next room, where I had seen a sink. I looked about for a bucket of some kind, but—better! I smashed the glass case holding a firehose, oblivious to the shrieking alarm this set off, and wrenched the wheel over until the hose came to life like a wrathful dragon, spewing a destructive jet that smashed cases of fiendish instruments and foul drugs open and hurled their contents clattering and crashing through the torture-chambers.

I manhandled it back to the morgue and directed the stream on the ceiling above the Deep One, bouncing down a flood of life-giving water on the poor victim.

I didn’t notice when the alarm was silenced. I couldn’t understand why the hose suddenly went limp and dry. Then I became aware of the man quacking furiously at the door to the next room.

“Put that down, you goddamn loony! Drop it, asshole, or you are dead meat!”

I had found what I wanted, a human being to absorb the full force of my rage, and I threw the hose aside and stalked toward him.

“Don’t you realize what you’re doing here!” I screamed. “Don’t you know—”

“I know what I’m doing is catching a goddamn Loony who’s fucking up the hospital. Stop! Stop right now! This here is a .357 Magnum, shit-head, and it’s about to tear out your spine and pin it to the far wall. I am not joking with you.”

I stopped. What could I have been thinking of? All hope of escape was lost. Dr. Saltonstall would lock me up tight. More probably he would take no more chances with me, and I would be filling one of these morgue-drawers before lunchtime tomorrow.

“That’s better. Assume the position.”

I knew what he meant. I turned to the wall, leaning forward to support my weight with my hands on a closed drawer. He strutted up behind me and took great delight in kicking my ankles wider apart.

“Scabby son of an Innsmouth bitch,” he snarled, “I’m really hurting to blow your baldy-ass head all over the wall just for laughs, so don’t try nothing, you hear? I just want an excuse to blow one of you scum-suckers away. What the hell you got here?”