Laughter at the Academy Read online

  I never heard him moving behind me. I was completely oblivious when the chair slammed into my back, knocking me forward. He hit me a second time, harder, before he turned and ran, fleeing down the hall.

  Humans are hardy, resilient—mortal. Even unfinished and larval as I effectively was, I was still a daughter of Innsmouth. I shrugged off the blow and ran after him, my feet slipping in the spilled soup on the floor. The stairs were steep, and his damp footprints—the soup again—told me I was on the right track, at least until I reached the ground floor. He had enough of a head start that I only knew which way he had gone when I heard the back door slam behind him.

  There wasn’t time to go looking for my siblings, not if I wanted to stop him before he could reach the street and go looking for a payphone. I ran after him, out into the bright outside world, where the sea slammed against the shore like the beating of a vast, immortal heart. Then I stopped.

  Jeremy was some twenty yards ahead of me, standing motionless on the place where the soil gave way to sand. The sun glinted off the polished dome of his skull, catching odd, iridescent highlights from his skin. I hadn’t seen him in the sunlight before, not since his changes had truly begun. He was glorious. He was beautiful.

  I walked to join him. He glanced my way, flat copper irises shielded from the sun by his half-deployed nictating membranes, and he did not run.

  “What did you do?” he asked. His words were mushy, soft. All his teeth had fallen out the week before, and while I could see the needles of his new teeth pressing against his gums, they hadn’t broken through. He’d develop the Innsmouth lisp soon, assuming the transformations continued, that his body was able to endure the strain. “What did you do to us? Why?”

  “Why did you give cancer to all those mice?” I shrugged. “I needed to know if it was possible. I was telling you the truth when I said you had Innsmouth blood.” A runaway girl, a local boy, a relationship cut short when her parents had followed her trail to the Massachusetts coastline. It was an old story, and one that had played out in every coastal town like ours. But in her case, that long-buried ancestor of the man who stood beside me, there had been things about her suitor that she hadn’t been aware of. She’d carried his Innsmouth blood back to Iowa, where it had run through the generations like a poisonous silver line, finally pooling, dilute and deadly, in the veins of a man who wanted to change the world.

  Jeremy turned to give me a shocked, even hurt look. The newly inhuman lines of his face didn’t quite suit the expression. Deep Ones are many things. We’re very rarely shocked. “This is nothing like the mice. We’re human beings, and you took us captive and…did things to us. It’s not the same at all.”

  “You were human beings who experimented on lower life forms to see what would happen to them, and because you thought you had the right,” I said. “I read your Bible, you know. Years ago, when I first started at U.C. Santa Cruz. I wanted to…understand, I suppose. I wanted to know. And it said that God had given you dominion over all the plants and animals of the world, which meant that turning mice into explosive tumor machines was just fine. You were doing what God told you to do.”

  Jeremy didn’t say anything. He just turned, slowly, to look back at the sea. I think that was the moment when he understood. The moment he stopped fighting.

  “My God told me things, too, although I think He spoke to me a bit more directly than yours spoke to you. He said that some of His children had lost their way and needed someone to guide them home. He said that if I could figure out the way to do that, I could even help the faithful here in Innsmouth.” A world where we could choose to return to the sea, to swim with Mother Hydra, to be glorious and smooth and darting through the depths like falling stars. To live forever, and not worry about the fragile human skins of our tadpole state.

  “That didn’t give you the right.”

  “If your God gave you the right to put the needle to the mouse, then my God gave me the right to put the needle to the man.” I offered him my hand. “Come on. I need to get you back to the house.”

  “The sea doesn’t let me sleep.”

  I dropped my hand.

  “I can hear it, always. I think it’s trying to talk to me. I’ve started hearing words when the surf hits the shore.”

  “What does it say?”

  Jeremy turned to me, expression bleak. He was so beautiful, with his skin gleaming iridescent, and his sunken eyes. I would never have believed he could be so beautiful. “It’s saying ‘come home to me.’”

  “You’re not hearing the sea,” I said, and offered him my hand again. This time, he took it. His skin was cooler than mine. He would dive below Devil’s Reef before I did; he would see the abyssopelagic, and understand. I would have been envious, if I hadn’t been so relieved. “You’re hearing the voice of Dagon. He’s welcoming you. He’s welcoming you home.”

  Terry would need to be moved to a room that faced the sea; she deserved the chance to hear Him too, especially when she was doing so much better than Michael. Especially if hearing Dagon might mean that she would live. It would invalidate the experimental controls, but those didn’t matter anymore; the human rules of scientific inquiry had only ever been a formality. I was bringing the lost children of Dagon home.

  So much needed to be done. So much needed to be accomplished. My sister would be my first willing volunteer, and my heart swelled to think of her, finally beautiful, finally going home. But that was in the future. For now, I stood hand in hand with my first success, and turned to the sea, and listened to the distant voice of Dagon calling us to come down, deep down, below the waves.

  Acknowledgements

  ...and that, I suppose, is that: we have come to the end of this long and tangled slice of my literary works, spanning years and pages and hours of your life. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Honestly, I don’t have a “if you didn’t,” because I’m assuming you wouldn’t have picked it up if you hadn’t already known what you were getting into. These are some of my best stories, and some of my favorite stories, and a few of my weirdest thrown in for good measure. It is the scope of me, and it’ll be a few years before we can do this again.

  And so, thank yous.

  Thank you to John Joseph Adams, for helping me to improve beyond my wildest dreams, and to Jennifer Brozek, for taking a chance on me when no one else had seen my potential. Thank you to Ellen Datlow, for making my childhood dreams of anthology come true. And thank you to Jonathan Maberry and Bryan Thomas Schmidt, for commissioning me over and over again to write stories for them.

  Thank you to Charlaine Harris, for good advice and good conversa- tion, and for inviting me to play when she had an anthology for me to play in. Thank you to Toni Kelner, for excellent editorial notes and for being patient with me.

  Thank you to Yanni Kuznia, for allowing me to put this anthology together, and to Diana Fox, for making it all work. Huge, starry-eyed thank yous to Carla Speed McNeil, whose incredible artistic talent has elevated my work in whole new ways.

  Although she has worked more with me on long fiction than short, I must offer my profound thanks to Sheila Gilbert, without whom I would spend a lot more time deeply confused and trying to make sense of things. She is my rock, editorially speaking.

  Amy McNally has probably put up with more of my crap than any other fifteen people combined. I love her beyond all measure. Even when she plays her violin at six in the morning.

  Big thanks to my “pit crew”: Tara O’Shea, Chris Mangum, and Michelle “Vixy” Dockrey. I love them dearly, I need them more than I can say, and I am the luckiest girl in the world because they love me back. Additional thanks to Margaret Dunlap, Shawn Connolly, and Whitney Johnson. They know why.

  Thanks to my cats, for preserving my sanity on a day-to-day basis... and thanks to you, for reading. A story with no one to tell it to is a pretty poor tale. Being able to put together a short story collection is a privilege and an honor, and I am so happy to be sharing this one with the world. Those fools who lau
ghed at me in the academy will never know what hit them.

  I’ll see you next time.

  Copyright

  “Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)” Originally published in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius, 2013, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  “Lost” Originally published in Ravens in the Library: Magic in the Bard’s Name, 2009, SatyrPhil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk, eds.

  “The Tolling of Pavlov’s Bells” Originally published in Apex Magazine, January 2011, Catherynne M. Valente, ed.

  “Uncle Sam” Originally published in The Edge of Propinquity, October 2011, Jennifer Brozek, ed.

  “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust” Originally published in Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, 2013, John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, eds.

  “Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage” Originally published in Fantasy Magazine, December 2011, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  “Homecoming” Originally published in Lightspeed, September 2013, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  “Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher” Originally published in Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera for a New Age, 2013, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, ed.

  “We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War” Originally published in Robot Uprisings, 2014, John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson, eds.

  “The Lambs” Originally published in Bless Your Mechanical Heart, 2014, Jennifer Brozek, ed.

  “Each to Each” Originally published in Lightspeed, June 2014, Christie Yant, ed.

  “Bring About the Halloween Eternal!!!” Originally published in Help Fund My Robot Army!!! And Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, 2014, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  “Office Memos” Originally published in the Shamrokon souvenir program book, August 2014.

  “Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare” Originally published in Clockworks Universe: Steampunk vs Aliens, 2014, Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier, eds.

  “Driving Jenny Home” Originally published in Out of Tune, 2014, Jonathan Maberry, ed.

  “There Is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold” Originally published in The Doll Collection, 2015, Ellen Datlow, ed.

  “In Skeleton Leaves” Originally published in Operation Arcana, 2015, John Joseph Adams, ed.

  “Please Accept My Most Profound Apologies for What Is About to Happen (But You Started It)” Originally published in The Jurassic Chronicles, 2017, Crystal Watanabe, ed.

  “Threnody for Little Girl, With Tuna, at the End of the World” Originally published through the Toaster Project, July 2016.

  “From A to Z in the Book of Changes” Copyright © 2019 by Seanan McGuire.

  “#connollyhouse #weshouldntbehere” Originally published in What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre, 2016, John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, eds.

  “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” Originally published in The Gods of HP Lovecraft, 2015, Aaron J. French, ed.

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