Laughter at the Academy Page 36

  “Oh, Violet, it’s beautiful,” said Terry, gazing rapturously out her window at the tree-covered hills. Most of it was virgin forest. We had little interest in cutting down the trees that protected us from prying eyes, and when we were alone at home, we kept our houses cool, verging into cold. Leave the tropics for those who were not predestined to go down into the unrelenting deeps. Heat was a luxury of the land, and it was better not to get too accustomed to something that could never stay.

  “I never really thought about it,” I said. My own window faced the water, of course. No one I knew who lived in Innsmouth voluntarily faced away from the waves. Still, she looked so happy…I stepped closer, pointing to a distant rocky outcropping. “There used to be a house there, a long time ago. It burned down in a thunderstorm. The fire never spread to the trees, and since the family who owned the place owned all the surrounding woodlands, no one else has ever tried to develop there.”

  “It’s like traveling backward through time.” Terry shook her head. “How are you not crawling in conservationists?”

  “Most of them are out at Devil’s Reef, doing marine impact studies.”

  Terry turned to me, eyes wide. “We’re near Devil’s Reef?”

  I nodded. The government’s “accidental” bombing of Devil’s Reef back in 1928 was still taught in wildlife conservation classes, which pointed to the destruction of both the habitat and several potentially undiscovered species—a lot of the fish caught in that area were unique, unknown to science—as a clear example of why we needed more protected areas. Devil’s Reef had been locked down for decades. Human ships patrolled the waters; human scientists cataloged and studied the fish, excited by each new find, all blissfully unaware of what they would find if they dove too deep.

  Sometimes one of them did. And then it was all very sad, and their colleagues were reminded to respect the sea.

  “We can’t take a boat out to the reef itself, of course, but we can get pretty close,” I said. “Maybe we could go sailing in a few days, and let you see the rocks that break the surface.”

  Terry smiled brightly. “I would like that.”

  “Then I’ll see what we can do,” I said. “Dinner’s in an hour. Fish chowder. I hope you’re hungry.”

  “Starving,” she said.

  I felt a little guilty as I let myself out of the room and started down the hall. None of my friends had volunteered for this. They thought they were having a nice vacation that would end when they returned to their lives with suntans and new stories. They didn’t understand.

  But then, the mice hadn’t volunteered either. And none of my friends, when pressed, had hesitated a moment before picking up the needle.

  Mother might have been offended by being relegated to the kitchen while Pansy pretended to be her, but she still knew her role; the stew was thick and rich with cream, and the smell of the sedatives rolling off the bowls belonging to my friends was strong enough that it was a miracle none of them noticed. One by one, they filled their mouths, only to swallow, look puzzled, and lose consciousness. Christine was the first to pass out, followed in short order by Michael, and then by Terry, who slumped gently forward, already snoring.

  Jeremy was the last. He stopped, spoon halfway back to his bowl, and gave me a befuddled, deeply betrayed look. “Violet,” he said, and his tongue was twisted; it didn’t want to do as he said. His befuddlement deepened. “Wha’ did you do?” he asked, words slurring.

  I said nothing. I just looked at him solemnly, and waited until his head struck the table next to his bowl. The spoon skittered from his hand, coming to a stop when it hit the base of the soup tureen. Those of us who had joined my friends for dinner—my brothers, my sister Pansy, a few selected folks from town who were supposed to make the gathering seem realistic—sat in silence for several seconds. Finally, I pulled out my phone and checked the stopwatch app that had been running since the soup was served.

  “Thirty-seven seconds,” I said. “They should be out cold for at least an hour. Are the rooms ready for them?”

  “They are,” said my mother, from behind me. Her voice was thick with undercurrents and dark with tidal flows. I turned to her. She was standing in the doorway, her thinning hair slicked wet against her flattening skull, and she was so hideous that men would have screamed to see her, and so beautiful she took my breath away. “Everything is as you asked. Now I have to ask you a question, my arrogant, risk-taking girl. Are you sure? Do you think this will work?”

  I nodded solemnly. “I do.” Her voice was distorted, like she was speaking through thick mud. The Innsmouth accent had claimed her speech almost entirely. Underwater, her new voice would sound like the ringing of a bell, clean and clear and so perfect that it could never have existed in the open, impure air. She was almost done changing.

  She was looking at me dubiously. All my family was. Undaunted, I pressed on. “When I started this experiment, I told you what it would entail, and you agreed. Dagon—”

  “Not this again,” grumbled my eldest brother. Half his teeth were needled fishhooks, designed to catch and keep the creatures of the abyssal zone. It was almost a race between him and my mother, whose blood had never been as pure as my father’s. He had been gone before I left for Harvard, slipping silently down to the city beneath Devil’s Reef while I was at Santa Cruz. And that, right there—the difference between my mother and my brother, and my poor, still almost-human sister—was the reason that they needed me so badly.

  I looked at my brother, and I didn’t flinch. “Dagon chose me for a reason. I’ll make Him proud. I’ll make you all proud.”

  “And if you don’t?” There was a challenge in his voice, naked to the world.

  “Then I’ll have failed, and I’ll answer to Him when I go down below the waves,” I said. “Letting me try cost us nothing but time, and if we can’t afford a little time, who can?” My classmates were still sleeping. Christine was drooling. I looked at them, studying them, memorizing them as they were now. All this would change soon.

  “Besides,” I said. “If this doesn’t work, they’ll taste like anybody else. Now help me get them upstairs.”

  Christine and Michael woke alone. One more control on an already complicated experiment. Jeremy was still out, thanks to an additional dose of sedatives slipped between his cheek and gums. I was sitting by Terry’s bedside, making notes in my journal, when she jerked on the cuffs holding her to the bed. It was a small motion, but enough to cause the chain to clink against the bedframe. I lifted my head in time to see her open her eyes and blink groggily in my direction.

  “Violet?” she asked, voice thick with sleep. “Did I doze off?”

  She tried to sit up. The cuffs held her fast. Panic flashed through her eyes, taking the last of the drowsiness with it.

  “Violet?” There was a shrill note to my name this time. She hadn’t fully processed what was happening to her. This time, she strained against the cuffs hard enough to shift the bedframe slightly, and to yank at the IV line connected to the inside of her left elbow. She stopped, and stared at the needle like she had never seen anything like it before.

  “There’s an excellent chance your great-great-grandmother was from Innsmouth,” I said calmly, looking back to my journal. “Did you know? I suppose not, since you didn’t seem to recognize the name of the town. She had two children before she died. Your great-great-grandfather remarried, and had three more children by his second wife, who always presented the entire brood as her own. I guess remarriage wasn’t as commonplace back then, which seems odd, given the overall mortality rate. It’s hard to be absolutely sure who descended from which woman, but I’m ninety percent sure at this point that you descended from your great-great-grandfather’s first wife. We’ll know soon, I guess.”

  “Violet, this isn’t funny.”

  I glanced up. “It’s not supposed to be. I’m telling you why you’re here.”

  Terry stared at me. “What?”

  “You’re here because there’s
a very good chance that you’re descended from your great-great-grandfather’s first wife,” I said. “She was weak. She hadn’t even started to show the Innsmouth look when she died. I suppose that’s why her children never showed it—or if they did, we can’t find any record. At least one of them reached adulthood. That’s simple math. Your great-great-grandfather had five children by two wives, and four of them lived to have children of their own. If you are, in fact, descended from an Innsmouth woman, we’ll know in a few days.”

  Genuine fear flashed across her face. “A few…a few days? Violet, I have to get back to the school. You can’t just keep me here. The others will notice if I disappear.”

  “The others aren’t noticing anything right now, except for their own predicaments,” I said. “Christine has been screaming non-stop for the last two hours. Michael won’t stop laughing.”

  “You’re insane.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Where’s Jeremy?”

  “Still asleep. I’ll go to wake him soon.” I tried to sound reassuring. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honestly. We’ll keep you comfortable. We put the catheter in while you were asleep, so you won’t have to go through that messy ordeal, and in a few days, we’ll know everything we need to.”

  “You can’t…”

  “I’m a scientist,” I said. “This is exactly what I can do.”

  She was screaming at me as I got up and left the room, closing the door neatly behind myself and cutting off her shouts at the same time. Soundproofing had so many excellent uses. Checking my journal one last time to be sure I had all the notes I needed, I started down the hall toward Jeremy’s room, steeling my expression as I went. He would never know how easy he’d had it, working with mice. Mice couldn’t talk back, or ask why you were doing this to them…or figure out that they were in the control group.

  All four members of my little “social group” had been consuming a powder made from my extracted, purified plasma, mixed with various biogenic chemicals, for the past year and a half. I had monitored dosages, dates, everything, and watched them all for signs of transformation. Two of them had confirmed Innsmouth heritage, the bloodlines too thin and attenuated to allow them to hear Dagon calling without outside aid. The other two were human, as ordinary and temporary as anyone else. All of them would be told that they were Innsmouth-born. All of them would be encouraged to listen for Dagon’s voice whispering to them through my blood, which was even now dripping, one pure, perfect drop at a time, through their IV lines.

  Two could see the sea; two could see the land. One of each group had Innsmouth blood; one did not. For however long it took, they would eat the same, drink the same, experience all the same physical stimuli, and then…

  Then we would see what we would see.

  Quietly, I let myself into Jeremy’s room and sat down, reopening my journal and resuming my documentation of the day. It was easy to lose myself in my notes, letting the simple facts of the experiment take priority over everything around me. It was harder to keep going. Harder than I’d ever thought it would be when I had explained to my parents what I wanted to do, how I wanted to go among the outsiders and look for the missing cousins, the one we had always known existed, so far from the singing of the sea. I had come to them with Dagon’s voice in my heart and the great god Science in my hands, and when they had let me go, I had promised them the world of men wouldn’t change me, could never change me. I was a daughter of Innsmouth, beloved of Dagon, destined for the sea. Nothing as small or simple as the company of humans could change that.

  I had been young then. I had been a fool, unaware of the way rational scientists could sometimes fall in love with their laboratory animals, disrupting experiments and risking years of work for the sake of saving something with a lifespan no longer than a sneeze. I had believed my morality to be absolute and unassailable, and I certainly hadn’t expected to find myself feeling sorry for them.

  There was no room for pity here. Two of them would almost certainly die. My control group. I would have been happier if I’d been able to find more than four experimental subjects, but I had also wanted a fifty-fifty split, and even finding two of the lost cousins in a place where I could gain their trust had been a trial. I had followed hundreds of genealogies and family records to wind up back at Harvard, discarding schools with only one Innsmouth descendant, or whose resident cousins were too young, or too old, or too involved in fields where I would have no excuse for access. Harvard had been the only choice, and years of effort had been required to woo the four of them.

  Unless my treatments were more effective than they had any right to be, the two with no Innsmouth blood would leave me very soon. But the two who had an ancestral claim to these shores…

  They might still have a chance.

  Jeremy made a small, confused sound. I looked up, and smiled.

  “Violet? What’s wrong?” My sister stood, frowning at me as I leaned, white-faced and shaking, in the kitchen doorway. Silently, I held out my hand, showing her the contents of my palm. Two human incisors, both intact down to the root, blood-tipped and pearly.

  Her eyes widened.

  “Are your teeth falling out?” she asked, looking at my face, my hair, searching for some sign that my transition had accelerated.

  I shook my head. “My teeth have been loose for weeks, but I think it’s because of the immune response triggered when I harvested my plasma. They stopped weakening when I started spreading the harvests out among the family.” The words came easily, devoid of emotional response. If only everything were that easy! “They belong to Terry. The girl in the room that looks out over the forest.”

  How she had screamed when the teeth started dropping out of her head, when the hair started wisping from her scalp! How she had fought, how she had kicked, how she had done her best to deny what was happening to her! It would have been impressive, if it hadn’t been so frightening. She could hurt herself, and until we knew where she was in her transition, I didn’t want to risk it. Sedating her would be a solution. It might be the only solution. It was still something to be avoided for as long as possible.

  “Does this mean the process is working?” My sister made no effort to conceal the excitement in her voice. If this worked—if I could activate the sleeping seeds of Dagon that waited, eternally patient, in each of us—then she might be able to follow our father to the city below Devil’s Reef decades sooner than her thinning blood would have otherwise allowed.

  I couldn’t blame her for her excitement. I couldn’t join her in it, either. Not with Christine’s death so fresh in my mind. She’d lost all her teeth, too, and her fingers had twisted as the bones struggled to reshape themselves, following biological imperatives that were alien to her too-human flesh. She had still tasted human, when we disposed of her body according to the best and most traditional methods available to us. I’d fed her, one spoonful at a time, to her surviving classmates. They would never know, unless they lived. And if they lived, the life of one human woman would no longer seem so important.

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “They’re all changing. They’re all…becoming something more. But none of them is transforming with any real speed. Michael stopped breathing this morning. I had to give him CPR.” And his bones had been soft under my hands, more like cartilage than bone, bending and yielding until I’d been afraid of crushing his sternum. “They may survive. They may all die.”

  Terry’s teeth were falling out. Jeremy was completely bald, and his eyes had developed nictating membranes that slid closed a second before he blinked. Michael’s skeleton was going soft, and his irises had taken on a flat, coppery cast that looked more like metal than flesh. They were all changing. They had all changed.

  We were so far past the point of no return that it couldn’t even be seen on a clear day.

  The authorities had come to the house weeks ago. I had hidden upstairs while they spoke to my sister in the kitchen, asking whether she had noticed anything wrong with the car when my friends a
nd I had left to drive back to Boston. She had shaken her head and wept almost believable tears, asking again and again whether they thought I was dead or simply missing. Then she had mentioned, as if offhandedly, that we had been planning to drive down the coast before heading back to school.

  The footage of our cars being pulled out of the Atlantic had been shown on all the news programs two days later. There had been no bodies, of course, but there had been blood, and the windows had been broken. It wasn’t hard to go from the images on the screen to the thought that we’d been pulled from the vehicle by the current, and would never be seen again.

  At least part of that was true. None of my test subjects were ever going to be seen in the world of men again, and as for me…I had done my time outside of Innsmouth. I would stay here until my own returning was upon me, and then I would go, gladly, to the depths and the abyssopelagic dark below Devil’s Reef, where I could drift, and dream with Dagon, and allow my false idols and service to Science to fall away from me, no longer needed, no longer required.

  My sister looked at me gravely. “Do you think this is going to work?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked at the teeth in my hand. “I honestly don’t.”

  They had been locked in their rooms for almost a month when Jeremy surprised me. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and found his bed empty, the window standing ajar. For a moment, I froze, trying to understand what I was seeing. The bowl containing his breakfast fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers.

  “Jeremy?” I whispered. Then I bolted for the bed, jerking back the covers like he might be hiding there, somehow sandwiched between the blanket and the sheet. “Jeremy!”