Deeper (17 page)

Somewhere
along the way, nature had played as poorly with this thing as it did with the
platypus.
 
It was functional, and about
as ugly as a hidden sin left to fester.
 
I couldn't decide if it wanted to be a man, a fish or a toad.
 
It seemed to have features from all three,
and none of them matched together well.
 
There were spines along the back of the thing, running from the top of
the skull and down to the small of the back.
 
They varied in length and thickness and had a symmetry about them that
seemed perfectly in line with any number of fish.
 
Have you ever seen the spines on a
catfish?
 
They're thick and sharp and
flexible.
 
If you don't know better,
you'll mistake them for decoration, but I know from experience that the damned
things are capable of cutting through skin and muscle like it's not even
there.
 
I had the tip of one of those
barbs stuck in one of my fingers for a few weeks once; no matter how often I
cleaned the wound it refused to stay healthy.
 
I had infection after infection until it was finally removed.
 
When the doctors were able to figure out that
part of it was still inside my skin, it took almost two hours to extract it.

Thinking about
the spines on the back of the thing in that shower was enough to make my testicles
want to shrivel up and hide.
 
Did I
mention the stink of the thing?
 
I guess
maybe to its own kind it was all right but there was an odor around it that
made salt marshes smell like roses.
 
It
was like a blend of rotting fish and mildewed seaweed.
 
I didn't think it was any sort of pollutant
in the water, either, because the rest of the sea didn't reek that way and the
divers came out smelling like the ocean, not like something that died in it.

I examined it
from as many angles as I could to take in the full impact of what I was looking
at.
 
While I was doing that, the good
professor was taking pictures.

Diana was
watching it, too, but the expression on her face was as dark and ugly as I had
ever seen.
 
I don't think she could have
looked more disgusted or homicidal if she'd been offered a million dollars to
put on the best mean face she could.

I left the
bathroom with the full understanding that at least one person would be watching
the over the freak of nature at all times.
 
Frankly, the idea of that thing getting loose inside the yacht sat about
as well as the notion of force-feeding my right arm to a rabid bear.

‘Money talks
and bullshit walks,’ ever hear that one?
 
That's the reason my common sense was in check, just for the
record.
 
I was being paid to let these
people use my yacht and if that meant they caught something other than the
usual fish, what could I do?

I left the
bathroom and stepped outside to get away from the stench of the thing.
 
Jacob was waiting, and handed me a
cigarette.
 
I nodded my thanks and then
used his lighter to fire it up.

"What the
hell is that thing, Jacob?"

"Bad news."

"Yeah?
 
How you
figure that?"

"Okay,
maybe we should go into a little more detail about what exactly was supposed to
have happened here."

I looked over
at Jacob and he was looking back, his face even more mournful than usual.
 
I nodded and we moved to the back of the
yacht and sheltered from the worst of the wind that was cutting across the
deck.

I waited for a
few minutes, both of us smoking our cancer sticks, before I grew
impatient.
 
For his part, Jacob stared
out at the water and the black mass of the Devil's Reef.
 
"So, you were going to say something
about what used to be here?"

"Well,
remember, I'm a parapsychologist, so I tend to listen for the weird and wild,
right?"
 
I nodded, and he
continued.
 
"My interest in this
place, me and Mary's, is all of the stories of shipwrecks.
 
You were out the other night when we spotted
the ghost ship or whatever it was, so you know we've already had some
success."

I nodded
again.
 
"I don't know what it was,
but it was impressive to see."

"Okay, so
Martin Ward isn't interested in ghosts at all.
 
He and I have had several debates and he thinks ghosts are nothing but
figments of overactive imaginations.
 
He's interested in anthropology with maybe a side order of xeno-biology
thrown in for fun."

"Want to
explain that last part?"

"Xeno-biology
is the study of strange life-forms.
 
Someone says that Bigfoot is running around and it's the xeno-biologists
that check out the possibilities and come up with all sorts of
conjectures.
 
They're also the ones
who've been looking out for giant squids for centuries.

"Anyhow,
we aren't here for the same reasons, but the reasons we're here are the
same."

"Want to
pass that by me again?"

"I'm here
for the ghosts.
 
He's here for rumors
about an underwater city."

"Okay.
 
So he thinks Atlantis is under Golden
Cove?"
 
I was very good at not
laughing about that.
 
Really, I was.

Parsons smiled
tolerantly.
 
I guess he was used to that
sort of smart-ass comment.

"No,
Joe.
 
He's looking for evidence of a city
created by creatures just like the one in your bathroom."

"Are you
serious?"
 
I tried to wrap my brain
around the idea of a place the size of
Manhattan
populated by those things.
 
It wasn't a
pretty notion.

"Oh,
yes.
 
Completely."

"And you
footed the bill for this research?"

"Not
quite.
 
I added his research bill onto
mine.
 
I've known Martin for a lot of
years, Joe.
 
He's actually a very sharp
man when you get to know him."

"Really?
 
Because
I have to tell you, Jacob, pissing me off earlier and calling me names?
 
That wasn't very smart."

"I know
it and so does he."
 
He waved a hand
and shrugged his shoulders by way of apologizing for Ward's earlier
behavior.
 
"The thing is
,
he's never been able to get any backing on the idea,
because the sources for all of his research are either dead or missing."

"I'd
think that happens a lot with anthropologists."

"You'd be
right, too, but the physical evidence for what he's been looking for is very
scarce and most of the notes he could find regarding this underwater
civilization are second- and thirdhand reports from people who came into
Innsmouth for whatever reason and left in a hurry.
 
The closest thing to any physical evidence is
a crown that sits in a museum in
Newburyport
.
 
All anyone can say about the crown is that
it's old, made of gold, and has some finny-looking pictograms on it."

"So you
decided to be a Good Samaritan and cover his bills."

"No, I
have exclusive rights for publishing the scientific finding that he comes up
across in exchange for a very substantial amount of money covering his
expenses."
 
He shook his head.
 
"I look for ghosts, Joe, but I'm not
soft in the head.
 
If there's any truth
to what he's after, it's the sort of news that will at the very least knock the
scientific community on its collective ass."

"You
think so?"

"Think
about that thing in there.
 
I'm not
saying it's human or a missing link, but the ramifications of an intelligent,
aquatic, humanoid life-form wandering around in the sea for millions of years
will cause all of the biologists on the planet to reassess the creation of
man."

I did think
about it, and I couldn't help but grin a little at the idea.
 
Every Bible thumper who screamed that
evolution was a scam and that God had created the world in seven days would
have a cow if this thing was legitimately one of a larger collection of
creatures.
 
Every Darwinist on the planet
would have screaming orgasms at the idea of something that could be linked to
the idea that man evolved from fish in the sea and they now had proof.

Finally, I
nodded.
 
"So he's off the hook for
calling me an idiot earlier.
 
Tell me
more."

"Here's
the thing.
 
From what little Martin could
find, these Deep Ones, as he calls them, aren't just around here.
 
They're all over the planet and deep, deep
down in the waters.
 
Someone named Obed
Marsh — and I've researched the hell out of him, Joe, believe me — brought
these creatures into this area in the latter part of the seventeenth
century.
 
He allegedly made the townsfolk
mate with them."

"Okay,
that's got to be a crock of shit."

Jacob did that
patient smile of his again.
 
On some
people I would have called it patronizing, but not on him.
 
I don't think there's a patronizing bone in
his body.

"Here's
the next part of the scenario that gets weird, Joe.
 
There are documented cases of a
very
localized genetic disorder called ‘The Innsmouth
Look.’
 
This particular malfunction of
the human body normally started in puberty and continued on for years, slowly
altering the way a person looked.
 
It
started with swelling of the joints in a lot of cases, and progressed to
bulging eyes, a distinctive swelling of the lips, compounded by a gradual
alteration of the entire skeletal structure.
 
There were a lot of reported cases in Innsmouth back in the day, but
only a few were ever documented and only one or two were ever actually
photographed, mostly by a few biologists a the Miskatonic University biology
department."

"You ever
see any of the pictures?"

"Oh,
yes.
 
It caused a very noticeable change
in the shape of the body and skull.
 
Most
of the people who suffered from it apparently lost their hair at a young age
and I mean all of their hair, not some of it."

"And this
is documented?"

"Oh,
yes.
 
I've seen pictures of several cases,
and in one case there was a family that moved from the area to
Boston
.
 
One of the children was perfectly normal, and the other started showing
signs of the Innsmouth Look at around the age of twelve.
 
She was a plain-looking girl to begin with, Joe,
not exactly what I'd call a looker, but the doctors were very careful to
document the changes.
 
They took blood
samples; they measured her arms, her features, everything."

"How bad
did it get?"

"In ten
years' time before the girl left the area, they saw physical changes that
shouldn't have been possible.
 
The girl
complained of headaches, and it was easy to understand why.
 
Her bones changed.
 
There are certain diseases, neurofibromatosis
and Protens Syndrome, as examples, that can cause rapid changes in bone
structure but those are always random.
 
It might make one portion of the face bulge and distort but leave the
other alone.
 
Joseph Merrick, the
Elephant Man, is an example."

He paused to
light another cigarette off the butt of the one in his hand and gave me
another.
 
I figured I was going to have
to buy him a carton before it was all said and done.

"Joe, the
thing here is that all of the changes that happened might have looked
incredibly strange, but they were balanced; both of her eyes and the sockets
around them distorted in equal measure.
 
They also shifted in her skull, like a flounder's do when it gets
older."

"Jesus."
 
I shook my head and felt my skin crawl.
 
"No wonder she bitched about
headaches."

"Exactly.
 
The
photos I saw showed the changes every year, and they were getting progressively
more intrusive as time went on.
 
The
girl's entire body was changing along the same lines and the last time she came
in for pictures she'd developed a rather extreme skin rash that the doctors
discovered was a side effect of her skin not getting enough moisture.
 
They gave her a lotion and within days it
started clearing up."

"So you
think somehow the thing in there and the
girl are
related?"

"No.
 
I don't think any such thing.
 
I just think it's interesting to note that
the ways in which her body changed looked a little like what that thing looks
like."

"So these
Deep Ones could mate with humans?"
 
The thought sickened me.

"Maybe.
 
Or maybe
it's that they always start off as a human and change.
 
There's a lot of talk in the circles that
believe in this sort of thing, that they're an offshoot of Homo sapiens that
never left the water, or that adapted to stay in the water.
 
I don't know.
 
It's not
my are
of expertise."