The Innsmouth Syndrome (8 page)

It was still pouring with rain by the time she got back to the hotel, with no sign of it lifting.  Carla decided to call it a day and eat at the hotel with the two or three other disconsolate, travelling souls.  The food was indifferent, to say the least:  frozen fish, despite the proximity of the sea, tinned vegetables, sauce from a catering-size, plastic tub, and a flavourless Viognier loaded with sulphites.

She kept her laptop on the table while she ate, partly to discourage anyone from trying to make conversation and partly so that she could look for information on the Evangelical Order of David. 

Perhaps slightly surprisingly, they had no homepage at all.  Or at least none that Google could find.  The only hit was a link to a cult survivors site.  Carla followed the link and scanned the page until she found a throwaway reference halfway down.  The EOD was included in a list of active cults, that was all. 

Google also suggested that she might have meant the “evanjelicul order of david” and offered another link to that, but when she followed it she just got a 404 error.  It seemed that the target site no longer existed. 

Carla chewed her food thoughtfully for a few moments and then tried Googling for the url she wanted instead.  As luck would have it, the search engine had stored a copy of the page in its cache.  She loaded it and scrolled down the page until she found what she was looking for.

It was a post in a thread about conspiracy theories on some long-abandoned forum.  There had been pictures among the text at one point, but the links to whichever hosting service the author had used were no longer valid. 

so a irl friend of mine told me about this dangerus secret socity called the EVANJELICUL ORDER OF DAVID in MA.  it is a secret socity about the cult of dagon their God with links to FREEMASONS and the VATICAN CHURHC and other secret socitys and they have something todo with SCIENCEOLOGY.  he said it started way back and was close down by the FBI who used a submareen to bomb the headqarters but then it came back in 1970 disgised as a church.  they do experments on people by holding them underwater or sumthing and he reckuns they use special poisons from the sea to give u branewashing but if u talk shit about them they sue you.  LOL i will probably get sued for this post lol!!1!  ohh and they also believ in the end of the world something that they call CTHULHU and only they will servive because they will go and live in the sea!!!

The other posters in the thread were less than impressed with this story, some seeming to take rather personally the fact that someone had announced a cult of which they had never heard.  Yet, there was that word again that she had seen sprayed on the wall near the docks.  Cthulhu.  Coincidence?  Maybe the author of this illiterate internet screed was a local, repeating some youth meme peculiar to the area. 

“Special poisons from the sea”.  Carla could think of dozens of poisons found in fish and algae – saxitoxin, ciguatoxin, cholera toxin, tetrodotoxin, brevetoxin,  pectenotoxin;  many of them with profound neurological effects - but she couldn’t conceive of a role for them in “branewashing”.

Her phone began to ring with the special bleating tone she had assigned to calls coming from her boss.  He must be back from his bioterror seminar, no doubt full of good Italian food and wine, and implausible tales of how he had been the hit of the conference, putting the Europeans in their place and impressing everyone.  Carla shoved her plate away, closed her eyes and reluctantly answered it.  “Hi Terry.”

“Carla!  Hi, Terry here.  Just back from Florence, not seeing any e-mails here from you, thought I’d better check in with you.  You still down in Massachusetts?”

“That’s right.  Still here.”

“Right, right ...” he sounded distracted, and she could hear him typing away in the background.  “And, er, how’s that going?  Progress?”

Carla sighed.  “I don’t know, it’s a tough one Terry.  I’m seeing a lot of symptoms, but the locals aren’t exactly co-operative and there’s no kind of pattern I’m picking up.”

“Uh-huh, alright.  Well, you found any kind of infectious process?  Any evidence of transmission?  What’s the epi like?”

“Well, no.  I think we’re looking at something hereditary, maybe environmental.  I’ve never seen anything like it before.  I might know more in a few days.”

“Sure, I get you.  Well, look, if it’s not contagious then just shove it back to the EPA would you?  They caught this one, we’ve sent you down there, they can’t ask for more than that now.  I need you back here.  Rod managed to break his leg in Colorado.  The others are wrapping up there, but he’s going to be out of action for weeks now and we’ve got casework piling up.”

“How’d he do that?” 

“Who, Rod?  Took a tumble on the slopes.  Nothing too major, but enough that he can’t really go crawling through the ventilation system with a respirator on anymore, y’know what I mean?  Anyway, they’ve nailed the source, they’re all heading back before the weekend.  How about you?”

“Er, well, I need at least a few more days to get to the bottom of this one.  Even to get enough data to write the report.  I mean, you booked me into the hotel here for two weeks.  I’ve not even been here two days yet.”

“Did we?  Well, things change Carla.  I’m short-staffed at the best of times, I need you back here.  So, if you can’t find anything that puts this town, whatever it’s called, on the big map, then shunt it back to EPA.  I want you back here by the end of the weekend, I want these cases written up and forgotten about by Wednesday next week.  We good?”

“So, I’ve got two more days?”

“Stay for the weekend if you really want to, but be back in the office Monday morning.  OK?  Look, Carla, I’ve got to shoot, going round to John Cowley’s for dinner, want to update him on Florence.  I’ll see you Monday.”

“OK.  Bye T-“

“Take it easy.”  And he was gone.

Carla blew out her cheeks and dropped the phone back into her bag.  Typical.  Half a week ago, when his obsession had been demonstrating inter-agency cooperation, getting an investigator down to Innsmouth had been a matter of top priority.  Maybe he’d forgiven her for applying for that promotion, but more likely he’d just forgotten he was punishing her.

The other diners had all vanished and she was alone in the restaurant.  Feeling petulant, Carla ordered a half bottle of champagne.  If they felt no compunction about jerking her around all over the country, they could damn well pay for a few luxuries along the way.

She stood by the window, flinching slightly at the chill radiating through the glass.  At least the rain had stopped, the wet tarmac glinting orange beneath the town’s few working streetlights.  Carla wondered if Gary Taub was back out on the wet streets already, mourning his friends.  She had two days to finish her investigation or find a good enough reason to prolong it, unless she wanted to work through the weekend and go straight into the office on Monday.  Two days.  And the EOD, with their “special poisons from the sea”, were still the nearest thing she had to a lead.

*****

The next day dawned grey and blustery, but dry.  A thick quilt of cloud stretched to the horizon and it was so dark that some of the streetlights were still on when Carla left the hotel at half past nine. 

She had discovered that there was a Hertz office just off the I495, and she made driving inland the first order of business.  Exchanging the vandalised Honda for an identical, intact one, she was back in Innsmouth shortly after eleven.  Taking a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee, she decided to leave the EOD until the afternoon and check up on Gary Taub first.  The boy seemed willing to talk to her, if she could only get him away from his parents for a while.

She rang Khalil to find out where the family lived.  He sounded worried about the idea of her going alone, even offering to accompany her if she would wait.  Eventually he relented and gave her the address.   Washington Street.  Far side of the river.

The Taub residence was a small, two-storey hovel that backed onto a disused railway line.  A large, covered porch deck ran almost the full length of the frontage, but was entirely clogged with junk.  The garage had collapsed completely.  The rest of the house looked about ready to follow suit, its white paint flayed away by the coarse Atlantic wind.

Carla took a moment to steel herself for another encounter with Mrs Taub, then forced herself to step out of the car.  She was tempted to leave the engine running in case she needed a quick getaway. 

The long, unkempt grass growing around the house stirred ceaselessly in the dense air, but nothing else moved as she approached.  Carefully avoiding a broken step, she climbed up to the porch and knocked hesitantly on the front door.  Nothing.  She knocked again.  Still no-one came.

She could hear television coming from somewhere inside.  Someone was watching a daytime talk show by the sounds of it.  Either they couldn’t hear her, or they were deliberately ignoring her.  Irritated, Carla left the porch and started pushing her way through the tall grass at the side of the house.

The sitting room drapes were drawn shut but there was still a gap that Carla could see through, thanks to numerous missing or broken curtain rings.  The gloom within was relieved only by the cycling colours of the television screen.  Mr Taub was slumped in an armchair, still wearing the raincoat and sandals he had worn at the hospital the day before.  His jaw hung slackly and his puffy eyes were glazed, staring in rapt, unblinking fascination at the increasingly shrill argument being played out on-screen.

Carla was about to tap on the glass when she heard another window creaking open.  Stepping back she looked up to see Gary Taub’s head emerging from what she presumed, based on the frosted glass, was an upstairs bathroom.  She waved to him, and was about to call up when she realised that he was frantically gesturing for her to be quiet.  He stabbed his finger urgently towards the street and then held up his forefinger. 

Her car?  One minute.  Carla mouthed the words and the teenager nodded emphatically, and disappeared from view.  She shrugged and trudged back to the Honda.  It was Gary she wanted  to talk to, not his parents.  If she could question him in the car without having to square off against Mrs Taub again, it would be a bonus.

The teenager emerged from the house a couple of minutes later, looking around the deserted garden and street furtively as he jogged towards the car and got into the back seat. 

“Drive!” he hissed, slamming the door too hard.  “If my mom sees you out here she’ll throw a fit!”

“OK.  Where to?” asked Carla, turning the key.

“Who gives a fuck?  Just drive!”

Carla sighed, released the handbrake and pulled away from the kerb.  In the rear view mirror she could see Gary, sitting as low as he could, with his hood up for extra concealment.  He caught her looking at him and stared back as coldly as he could in an unconvincing display of teen bravado.  “Hey, lady, you got any cigarettes?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“We should stop so I can get cigarettes.”

He was testing the boundaries, seeing how far he could push her.  “Later.  We can do that later.  Maybe.  Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?”

Gary snorted.  “`S obvious why you’re here.  You’re here to stick your nose into other peoples’ business like you types always do.  Ain’t none of you got a clue.”

“Actually” replied Carla, airily, “I thought we might go to church.”