Harrison Squared Read online

  A trio of blue-black tendrils rose out of the water and latched on to the logs between my mother’s legs. The creature rolled up out of the water. It seemed to change shape with each movement, growing and absorbing limbs as it needed them. A globulous head formed, then fell forward, as if bowing in prayer. A new tendril extruded from its side and caressed my mother’s foot.

  “No,” I said. “She’s not for you.”

  The Blood Pilot rose up. A hole opened in its surface, and the interior was ringed with teeth.

  I recognized it now, as I’d recognized Urgaleth. This thing had taken a piece of me when I was three years old. Its bite had been poison, and had put me in the hospital for months. But it had never left me. Some of the infection stayed inside me. It roared in my head when I was angry. If I had let it control me, I would have killed someone by now. It would have liked that.

  A second tendril reached for Mom’s other leg.

  I screamed. I don’t know what I said, or in what language. All I heard was static. But I do know that it was a command.

  I felt the same rush of power I’d felt when I forced Professor Freytag to solidify, when I’d made him speak despite the Scrimshander’s hold on him.

  “She’s mine,” I said.

  The Blood Pilot shrank back, recognizing a fellow predator. And like any hunter, it understood territoriality.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  It oozed over the edge of the raft—at first slowly, and then all at once.

  I dropped onto my butt, shaking. After a moment I realized that the Muninn was under power again, and churning toward me. Good. That was good. I’d need that trident to cut through these ropes.

  Lydia was at the bow. She was pointing at me. No, not at me. Past me.

  I twisted to see. The Albatross floated on the other side of the whirlpool. Montooth and the Toadmother stood on the deck, and the huge woman was screaming—not in fear, but in rage.

  “COME BACK HERE, YOU STUPID CREATURE!” Her bellow carried across the water. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME! BRING ME THE PILOT! BRING IT TO ME!

  Fifty yards from her, Urgaleth surfaced again. Huge flukes like charcoal wings swept up and crashed down, loud as thunder. The sea buckled. But this time Urgaleth didn’t dive. It coursed along the top of the water … heading straight toward the Albatross.

  Perhaps they had time to say a prayer to whatever gods they worshiped. Certainly the god rushing toward them wasn’t listening.

  Urgaleth, the Mover Between Worlds, slammed into the Albatross. The ship exploded like a matchstick model, timbers and shards pinwheeling through the air. I crouched over my mother and ducked my head. When the waves subsided, both ship and beast were gone.

  22

  O dream of joy! is this indeed

  The lighthouse top I see?

  Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  Mom lay in the center of a large bed. She’d become a switchboard for a dozen tubes and wires, all connecting her to a choir of beeping, hissing machines. Her skin was pale, her lips colorless but strangely glossy from the Vaseline the nurses had applied. But what disturbed me most was that she was lying in a way she never did at home. Mom was a sprawler and a twitcher, and this person was as still and compact as a mummy.

  But she was warm. I gripped her hand, and talked to her to convince myself that the machines were not lying.

  The nurses weren’t happy that I was out of my own bed. I’d been checked in last night, after passing out in one of the emergency examination rooms, and had woken up in a room with Aunt Sel asleep in a chair beside me. I’d insisted on seeing my mom, and had tried to hop into the hallway. Aunt Sel and the nurses had calmed me down by getting me into a wheelchair and taking me to her. As long as I stayed in the chair and didn’t unplug the IV from my arm, they let me sit beside her. Aunt Sel told me to take as much time as I wanted and left me alone.

  The doctors didn’t know why she was in a coma. They’d taken CAT scans, sampled her blood, monitored everything they could think of. Besides the fact that she was a little malnourished and very dehydrated, they could see no reason for her continued unconsciousness. One of the older doctors said he’d seen this before, a spate of similarly unsolved cases in the area, the most recent one from ten years ago. Then they’d suspected a new type of virus. Their unofficial name for it was “the Dunnsmouth Disease.”

  I didn’t try to tell them about monsters and mystical scrimshaw. They wouldn’t have believed me. But I did try to tell Mom.

  I told her everything, from the night she disappeared until the moment Erik Hallgrimsson had cut her free from the raft: meeting Lub and Lydia, spying on the Toadmother, outing Professor Freytag. Every new detail sounded more and more insane. But I told myself that Mom would understand, because she’d lived through half of the story herself. And someday she’d tell me her side of it: what had happened the night Dad drowned, and the night Hal Jonsson’s second boat went down, and even, if I could bear to hear it, what the Scrimshander had done to her. That would come later, when she woke up. But for now, I talked and talked, because I was afraid to say the one thing I most needed to.

  Finally, I was out of words, except for those. I held her hand in both of mine, and laid my forehead down on the bedrail.

  “I should have found you earlier, Mom,” I told her. “I’m so sorry.”

  All those days we spent searching the wrong stretch of coastline. All those days of following Waughm instead of Montooth. If I’d been smarter, I would have found a way to make Montooth turn her over to me. Or called down Detective Hammersmith to search the school, top to bottom.

  But it was too late. Now she was a vegetable, turned into a living ghost, exactly like Lydia’s parents. We came from a family of scientists, but what could science do in the face of this?

  The door opened behind me. “Harrison?” It was Aunt Sel. “There are some officers who’d like to talk to you.”

  I released my mother’s hands and sat up. I wasn’t ready for this.

  “But there’s someone who insists on talking to you first. Would it be all right if she came in?”

  That could only be one person. “Sure,” I said.

  Lydia closed the door behind her. “I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m in love with you.”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t think of anything more witty to say. I lowered my voice. “Is Lub okay?”

  “He’s banged up, but fine. Turns out he’s a little hard to kill.”

  “How about Montooth?”

  “Still missing. But I don’t think anything could have survived that crash. Waughm’s in charge of the school now. It turns out that he never got on the Albatross.”

  “Lucky him,” I said. “But your uncle Micah?”

  “He was steering the ship. Also missing.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Her face held no expression. “He brought it on himself.”

  “Okay, but—”

  She handed me a piece of paper. I could tell by the off-kilter letters that it had been typed on an actual typewriter. “I had the Involuntaries bulletproof this,” she said. “We think it’s solid.”

  “What is it?”

  “Our story.”

  “I’m supposed to memorize this?”

  “The details, not the sentences. That would be an amateur mistake.”

  “It says that Garfield heard Montooth tell Waughm to ‘get that Harrison woman’ on the boat.” I looked up. “Waughm will deny it.”

  “Sure. But we’re going to implicate him as much as possible—Waughm and Chief Bode. Let them squirm.”

  The rest of the story was almost the truth. After getting the word from Gar, I convince Erik Hallgrimsson to follow the Albatross, he tries to radio the Coast Guard but fails, and then when I see my mom tied up to the raft, I instinctively dive in to save her.

  “No mention of Lub,” I said. “Or Dwellers. Or sea monsters.”

  “We thought it was best to keep it believable
.”

  “So what’s the explanation for how the Albatross blew up?”

  “Not your problem. Don’t speculate.”

  I looked it over one more time, then handed the sheet back to her. “There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense, though.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “You. Why were you on the boat with me? Why’d you do all this for me? This was my problem, not yours.”

  “Because we’re in love,” she said flatly. “Everybody thinks so.”

  “You’re a criminal mastermind,” I said.

  “We’re not finished breaking the law yet, Harrison Squared.”

  * * *

  A week later, I was standing with Lydia at the edge of the arena pool in the middle of the night. She was uncharacteristically nervous: pacing, playing the beam of her flashlight over the pool’s surface, hands moving in fingercant as if she was talking to herself. I leaned on crutches and watched the water. It would take weeks and a trip back west for me to get a new leg, and I’d outgrown all my old models.

  Lub’s head popped up out of the water, and he handed me his canvas bag. “That’s it,” he said. “Those are the last ones.”

  We helped him out of the water. The cut on his forehead was still visible, but he looked otherwise unharmed. He said no one among the Elders had even noticed his wounds—they were too busy celebrating. Evidently, they were all excited that Urgaleth had surfaced and that the Blood Pilot had been delivered. It didn’t seem to matter to them that I’d kept the thing from inhabiting the host. They were all sure they’d fulfilled their holy duty and that the destruction of the human world was nigh.

  Cults. They always thought the glass was half-doomed.

  Lub and I began unloading the bag, and Lydia began stacking the scrimshaw according to some scheme I couldn’t work out. There were over fifty pieces, and each one I’d touched was blood-warm, almost moving in my hands. The arena seemed to be filling with voices murmuring to each other.

  Lub and Lydia, however, felt nothing. To them the scrimshaw were just engravings in tooth and baleen. Artifacts.

  Then Lub handed Lydia a piece and she grunted as if she’d been punched.

  “You found them,” I said.

  She nodded. I leaned close and saw the gleam of tears in her eyes. The portrait was of a man and woman with Lydia’s wide eyes and dark hair. They bore little resemblance to the graying, unmoving people lying in the living room of her uncle’s house.

  “They’re alive,” I said. “I can feel them in there.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “I can’t stand it if they’re trapped in there.”

  “At least they’re somewhere, right?” Lub asked. “Some of these people don’t have bodies to go back to.”

  “And how do we do that?” Lydia asked. She turned on me. “You have any answers for that?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “For neither of us.”

  She looked away, and then nodded. For a moment she’d forgotten that we were in the same situation now. Both of us were artificial orphans.

  “So where do we store these?” Lub asked. “I’ve got room at the lighthouse.”

  “We return them to the families,” Lydia said. “As best we can.”

  That made sense. The portrait of my mother was hidden in my bedroom. I didn’t want the police to seize it as evidence or something.

  I squatted, balancing on one crutch, and picked up a portrait that I’d set aside. “I’ll take care of this one.”

  * * *

  The door to the library was unlocked. The lights, hanging high above the shelves, were still on. Maybe they were always on. Inside, it was never day or night. It was always Library Time.

  I stumped my way through the stacks, not bothering to call out the professor’s name. I knew he was in here somewhere. Instead, I enjoyed the quiet, and the presence of these old tomes. Books were always waiting. Hoping, silently, that someone would take them from the shelf.

  I turned a corner, and there was Professor Freytag. He was looking at a high shelf, frowning in concentration. I waited for him to notice me. When that didn’t work, I quietly cleared my throat.

  Even that sound made him jump. “Harrison!”

  I was pleased he could remember my name. “How are you doing, Professor?”

  “Terrible! And you?”

  “I was just thinking, it’s like the books are watching me, wanting me to pick them up, but they’re too polite to ask.”

  “Of course,” the professor said. “The best books are always reserved.”

  I laughed. “Good one.”

  He looked at me quizzically, then broke into a smile. “Oh! Yes! Ha ha!” He removed his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief, clearing ethereal dust with ectoplasmic cloth. “You know, I used to love jokes. Made them all the time. At least I think so. And very recently I began to feel … lighter. More free.”

  “The Scrimshander’s dead,” I said.

  “Oh, many men have thought so.”

  “No. I saw him die.”

  “Well then. Perhaps that’s it. Still…”

  “Still. You’re looking.”

  He gazed up at the shelves. “Oh, yes. I’m sure it’s in here somewhere.”

  “I was thinking. Maybe it’s not a book.” He looked at me quizzically. I set my crutches against the shelf and took off my backpack. He watched as I unzipped the pack and took out a plate made of bone.

  “I think this belongs to you,” I said.

  He placed his glasses back on his nose and leaned over. “Oh,” he said. “Oh my.” It was a fine likeness. The Professor Freytag before me was exactly like his portrait. Unlike Lydia’s parents, there was no living body to continue aging.

  He turned away from me.

  “Professor?”

  “Just give me a moment.” He took off his glasses again and wiped at his eyes.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said.

  “Upset me?” He turned, and put on a smile. “My boy, you’ve delivered to me a pearl of great price.”

  “Tell me what to do with it, Professor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do I set you free? Do I smash it?”

  “Oh, don’t do that! There’s no telling what the consequences could be!”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  His expression softened. “Tell me what’s happened,” he said.

  “There are other portraits,” I said. “One’s of my friend’s parents. And there’s one of my mother.”

  “Ah. I see. Come, my boy. Sit down. Let’s talk through the situation.”

  I sat in the armchair I’d found him in on my second visit. He stood patiently as I talked, not even pacing. I told him everything that had happened out on the water, and everything I’d since remembered about my childhood.

  “First of all, let me congratulate you,” he said. “Lesser men, upon seeing the things you have seen, might have gone mad. Oh, I’ve witnessed it myself. Two colleagues of mine glimpsed the mere aspect of a creature from another dimension and lost their heads. Both ended their lives in asylums. But you, my boy, seem to be remarkably sane.”

  “I don’t feel that way.”

  “I understand. You’ve got one foot on the Other Side now.”

  “I think I stepped across that line a long time ago,” I said. “I just didn’t know it.”

  “The Blood Pilot, yes. You were bitten as a child, and infected. But you survived. You’ve obviously developed a sensitivity to the Other Side.”

  “Just tell me what to do,” I said. “How do I get my mother back?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “I hate this!” I said. “Magic. The supernatural. Before Dunnsmouth, I thought the world was a rational place. I knew how things worked, and if I didn’t know, I could figure them out with logic and a little research. I knew the difference between fact and fantasy. But since then I’ve made friends with an amphibian, fought an ancient seria
l killer, and faced down a god.”

  “And talked to ghosts.”

  “Exactly! None of this makes any sense! I want science back!”

  Professor Freytag seemed amused. “When the supernatural turns out to be real, it’s not supernatural anymore—it’s just nature. Yes, it may be strange, uncanny, or frightening. It’s always scary to find out that the world is bigger and more complex than you thought. But that doesn’t mean you give up. What if Galileo had given in to peer pressure? What if van Leeuwenhoek had thrown away his microscope when he discovered that there were tiny animals living in our bodies? And does anybody really understand quantum mechanics?

  “But think of how much you’ve already learned about this ‘nonsensical’ field. One: Consciousness can exist outside the body. I’m unliving proof!”

  “Uh…”

  “You see what I did there?”

  “Comedy. Right.”

  “Second: The Scrimshander has discovered a technology by which to transfer consciousness and store it in another medium.”

  “Like a hard drive,” I said.

  “I’ve never understood baseball metaphors,” he said.

  “No, a hard drive is a—never mind. Go on.”

  “Third: Technology can be learned. There must be a way to undo what has been done, and move the consciousness to its proper location. We only have to find the right instruction manual.” He nodded at his portrait, now lying on the floor. “In the meantime, let’s find a place to hide that. On a low shelf, mind you, where I can see it. I’d forgotten how handsome I am.”

  * * *

  The day my mother was released from the hospital, Aunt Sel threw her a welcome home party. Amazingly, she did not have it catered from Uxton. “This is a Dunnsmouth affair,” she said. She cajoled Erik Hallgrimsson and his wife, Andrea, into providing fresh lobster, and Lydia made something called dagon chowder, which involved many ingredients I’d never heard of. Saleem made a dessert from an ancient recipe he’d learned as a child from his Persian mother: pineapple upside-down cake.

  “Where are you from, again?” I asked.

  “Minnesota.”

  “Right.”

  I was pretty sure Lub was lurking outside the house—we’d made plans to talk later that night—so I made a show of carrying the cake past the window.