Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (44 page)

Lacey laughs a little too loudly, her voice echoing in the museum. “Yeah,” she says. “It would have,” and she takes the box from the woman, chubby little Dr. Hanisak like a storybook gnome, Dr. Hanisak whose specialty is the evolution of rodent teeth. The box is wrapped tight with packing tape, so there’s no danger of its coming open on the train.

“Then you’re all set now?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be.”

“And you’re
certain
you want to do this? I mean, it’s awfully high-profile. I expect you’ll be in newspapers all over the world when the reporters get a look at what’s in that box. You might even be on CNN. Aren’t you scared?”

Lacey stares for a moment at the dusty bones of a saber-tooth cat mounted near the mammoth’s feet. “You bet,” she says. “I’m terrified. But maybe it’ll at least bring in some new funding for the museum. We could sure use it.”

“Perhaps,” Dr. Hanisak replies uncertainly, and she folds her hands and stares at the box. “You never can tell how these things will turn out, in the end.”

“I suppose not,” Lacey says, and then she looks at her watch and thanks Dr. Hanisak again. “I really have to get going,” she says and leaves the woman standing alone with the skeletons.

Excerpt from
Famous Film Monsters and the Men Who Made Them
by Ben Browning (The Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ, 1972):

Certainly there are several interesting stories floating about Hollywood regarding producer William Alland’s inspiration for the story. The one most often repeated, it would seem, recounts how Alland heard a tale during a dinner party at Orson Welles’ home regarding an ancient race of “fish-men” called the
dhaghon
inhabiting remote portions of the Amazon River. Local natives believed these creatures rose from the depths once a year, after floods, and abducted virgins. Naturally, the person telling the story is said to have sworn to its veracity. Another, less plausible, source of inspiration may have been a tradition in some parts of Massachusetts, in and around Gloucester, of humanoid sea monsters said to haunt a particularly treacherous stretch of coast near Ipswich Bay, known appropriately enough as the “Devil’s Reef.” Rumor has it Alland knew of these legends, but decided to change the story’s setting from maritime New England to the Amazon because he preferred a more exotic and primeval locale. At any rate, one or another of these “fish stories” might have stuck with him and become the germ for the project he eventually pitched and sold to Universal.

3:47 P.M.

She goes through the peeling red door, and she follows the old man down long hallways dimly lit by bare incandescent bulbs, wallpaper shreds, led upstairs and downstairs, and finally, a door he opens with another silver key. A steel fire door painted all the uncountable shades of dried gore and butcheries, and it swings open slow on creaking hinges, pours the heavy scents of frigid air and formaldehyde at their feet. There’s light in there, crimson light. Lacey looks at Dr. Solomon Monalisa, and he’s smiling a doubtful, furtive smile.

“What am I going to see in there?”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” he says and holds one skinny arm out like a theater usher leading her to an empty seat.

“I asked you a simple question. All I wanted was a simple answer.”

“Yes, but there are no
simple
answers, are there?”

“What’s waiting for me in there?”

“All things are but mirrors, Miss Morrow. They reflect our deepest preconceptions, our most cherished prejudices.”

“Never fucking mind,” she says and steps quickly across the threshold into a room as cold as the back of the Ford van. The room is almost empty, high concrete walls and a concrete ceiling far overhead, banks of darkroom red lights dangling on chains, and the tank, sitting alone in the center of it all.

“You’re a very lucky woman,” Dr. Monalisa says, and the steel door clicks shut behind her. “Have you any idea, my dear, how few scientists have had this privilege? Why, I could count them all on my left hand.”

The tank is at least seven feet tall, sturdy aquarium glass held together with strips of rusted iron, filled with murky preservative gone bloody beneath the lights, and Lacey stares at the thing floating lifeless behind the glass.

“What do
you
see, Miss Morrow?”

“My god,” she whispers and takes another step towards the tank.

“Now that’s a curious answer.”

Neither man nor fish, neither fish nor amphibian, long legs and longer arms, and its bald, misshapen skull is turned upwards, as if those blind white eyes are gazing longingly towards Heaven. Solomon Monalisa rattles his keys and slips the handcuffs from her aching wrists.

“
Grendelonyx innsmouthensis
–
that’s
what I thought you’d see, Miss Morrow. Grendel’s claw.”

“But it’s impossible,” she whispers.

“Quite completely,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “It is entirely, unquestionably impossible.”

“Is it real?”

“Yes, of course it’s real. Why would I show it to you otherwise?”

Lacey nods her head and crosses the room to stand beside the tank, places one hand flat against the glass. She’s surprised that it isn’t cold to the touch. The creature inside looks pale and soft, but she knows that’s only the work of time and the caustic preserving chemicals. 

“It got tangled in a fishing net, dragged kicking into the light of day,” the old man says. His footsteps are very loud in the concrete room. “Way back in November ’29, not too long after the Navy finished up with Innsmouth. I suspect it was wounded by the torpedoes,” and he points to a deep gash near the thing’s groin. “They kept it in a basement at the university in Arkham for a time, and then it went to Washington, the Smithsonian. They moved it here right after the war.”

She almost asks him which war, and who “they” are, but she doubts he would tell her, not the truth, anyway. She can’t take her eyes off the beautiful, terrible, impossible creature in the tank – its splayed hands, the bony webbing between its fingers, the recurved, piercing claws. “Why are you showing me this?” she finally asks, instead.

“It seemed a shame not to,” he replies, his smile fading now, and he also touches the aquarium glass. “There are so few who can truly comprehend the…” and he pauses, furrowing his brow. “The
wonder
– yes, that’s what I mean, the wonder of it all.”

“You said you have the fossil.”

“Oh, yes. We do. I do. Dr. Hanisak was kind enough to switch the boxes for us last night, while you were finishing up at the museum.”

“Dr. Hanisak – ”

“Shhhhhh,” and Monalisa holds a wrinkled index finger to his lips. “Let’s not ask
too
many questions, dear. I assure you, the fossil is safe and sound. I’ll give it back to you very soon. Ah, and we have all your things from the train. You’ll be wanting those back as well, I should imagine. But I wanted you to see our friend here first, before you see the film.”

“What film?” she asks, remembering the photograph from the manila envelope, the letter, the nosy woman asking her if she liked old monster movies.

“What odd sort of childhood did you have, Miss Morrow? Weren’t you allowed to watch television? Have you truly never seen it?”

“My mother didn’t like us watching television,” Lacey says. “We didn’t even own a TV set. She bought us books, instead. I’ve never cared much for movies. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then that may be the most remarkable part of it all. You may be the only adult in America who’s never seen
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
,” and he chuckles softly to himself.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I should certainly hope so.”

At last she turns away from the dead thing floating in the tank and looks into Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s sparkling eyes. “You’re not going to kill me?” she asks him.

“Why would I have gone to all the trouble to save you from those thugs back there if I only wanted you dead? They’d surely have seen to that for me, once they figured out you didn’t have the fossil any longer.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Lacey says and realizes that she’s started to cry.

“No,” he says. “But you weren’t meant to. No one was. It’s a secret.”

“What about my work?”

“Your article has been withdrawn from
Nature
. And Dr. Hanisak was good enough to cancel the press conference at the Peabody Museum.”

“And now I’m just supposed to pretend I never saw any of this?”

“No, certainly not. You’re just supposed to keep it to yourself.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t you just destroy the fossil? Why don’t you destroy
this
thing?” and she slaps the glass hard with the palm of her hand. “If it’s a goddamn secret, if no one’s supposed to know, why don’t you get rid of it all?”

“Could
you
destroy these things?” the old man asks her. “No, I didn’t think so. Haven’t you taken a oath, of sorts, to search for answers, even when the answers are uncomfortable, even when they’re
impossible
? Well, you see, dear, so have I.”

“It was just lying there in the cabinet. Anyone could have found it. Anyone at all.”

“Indeed. The fossil has been missing for decades. We have no idea how it ever made its way to Amherst. But you will care for it now, yes?”

She doesn’t answer him, because she doesn’t want to say the words out loud, stares instead through her tears at the creature in the tank.

“Yes, I thought you would. You have an uncommon strength. Come along, Miss Morrow. We should be going now,” he says and takes her hand. “The picture will be starting soon.”

For David J. Schow, Keeper of the Black Lagoon

From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6

Most times, a story comes to me as an image, a jumble of images, a character, a name, fragments, or a confetti of words. I don’t think in plots. I don’t have clever ideas. This story is an exception to that rule.
Grendelonyx
, if only it was the first half of a genuine binomen. A Late Jurassic English ichthyosaur was christened
Grendelius
, but the name has since been ruled a junior synonym of
Brachypterygius
. Sorry. I start talking paleontology, I will prattle on and on. But I did find Innsmouth…

Andromeda Among the Stones

“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering…”

H. P. Lovecraft

October 1914

“Is she really and truly dead, Father?” the girl asked, and Machen Dandridge, already an old man at fifty-one, looked up at the low buttermilk sky again and closed the black book clutched in his hands. He’d carved the tall headstone himself, the marker for his wife’s grave there by the relentless Pacific, black shale obelisk with its hasty death’s-head. His daughter stepped gingerly around the raw earth and pressed her fingers against the monument.

“Why did you not give her to the sea?” she asked. “She always wanted to go down to the sea at the end. She often told me so.”

“I’ve given her back to the earth, instead,” Machen told her and rubbed at his eyes. The cold sunlight through thin clouds was enough to make his head ache, his daughter’s voice like thunder, and he shut his aching eyes for a moment. Just a little comfort in the almost blackness trapped behind his lids, parchment skin too insubstantial to bring the balm of genuine darkness, void to match the shades of his soul, and Machen whispered one of the prayers from the heavy black book and then looked at the grave again.

“Well, that’s what she always told me,” the girl said again, running her fingertips across the rough-hewn stone.

“Things changed at the end, child. The sea wouldn’t have taken her. I had to give her back to the earth.”

“She said it was a sacrilege, planting people in the ground like wheat, like kernels of corn.”

“She did?” He glanced anxiously over his left shoulder, looking back across the waves the wind was making in the high and yellow-brown grass, the narrow trail leading back down to the tall and brooding house that he’d built for his wife twenty-four years ago, back towards the cliffs and the place where the sea and sky blurred seamlessly together.

“Yes, she did. She said only barbarians and heathens stick their dead in the ground like turnips.”

“I had no choice,” Machen replied, wondering if that was exactly the truth or only something he’d like to believe. “The sea wouldn’t take her, and I couldn’t bring myself to burn her.”

“Only heathens burn their dead,” his daughter said disapprovingly and leaned close to the obelisk, setting her ear against the charcoal shale.

“Do you hear anything?”

“No, Father. Of course not. She’s dead. You just said so.”

“Yes,” Machen whispered. “She is.” And the wind whipping across the hillside made a hungry, waiting sound that told him it was time for them to head back to the house.

This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss…

“But it’s better that way,” the girl said, her ear still pressed tight against the obelisk. “She couldn’t stand the pain any longer. It was cutting her up inside.”

“She told you that?”

“She didn’t have to tell me that. I saw it in her eyes.”

The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out, one by one, and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky.

“You’re only a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see such things. Not yet.”

“It can’t very well be helped now,” she answered and stepped away from her mother’s grave, one hand cupping her ear like maybe it had begun to hurt. “You know that, old man.”

“I do,” and he almost said her name then, Meredith, his mother’s name, but the wind was too close, the listening wind and the salt-and-semen stink of the breakers crashing against the cliffs. “But I can wish it were otherwise.”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”