Agents of Dreamland(14)
The thing beneath the ice speaks with a voice like angry bees.
. . . until you aren’t anymore.
It knows she’s there.
And then the day slips away from her, and for a while there’s nothing but the view from the Gulfstream’s window, only clouds and the shimmering bluish suggestion of the ocean so very far below. She waits to fall, not from the sky, but from the tenuous strands of Now. Falling is the easiest thing in the world.
It’s only a matter of remembering not to hold on.
All things are alone in time.
That is the Second Law.
And here it is a brilliantly sunny November day in southern Vermont, hardly a month after the Mexican government ended the rebellion in Veracruz and only four days before Stalin will become the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. She spent the night in a dingy boardinghouse in Townshend, not sleeping, reading Wordsworth by lantern light, and waiting for sunrise. The night was alive with new ghosts. A week before she arrived, the West River flooded, the worst flood in Vermont history. Eighty-four people are known dead. More than twelve hundred bridges were swept away. Fuck only knows how many miles of road and railway were destroyed, how many houses and businesses, sawmills and farms. Immacolata had to make the trip over the mountains on horseback, following muddy deer paths and steep, winding hunting trails all the way up from Brattleboro. She’s always been good with horses.
At eight o’clock, she pulls on her coat and felt cloche and leaves the boardinghouse with her leather Gladstone satchel. A constable accompanies Immacolata to the tin-roofed redbrick shed behind the volunteer fire department on Grafton Road, where a surly man in overalls shows her the ugly pink-skinned thing that’s been pulled out of the angry, swollen waters of the West River. There’s no way of knowing how far it traveled before snagging up in a jackstraw tangle of fallen logs, barbed wire, and other debris just north of town. Two teenage boys—a farrier’s sons—came upon the body and told their story all about Townshend until someone had at last gone to see what it was they’d found. And what they’d found turned out to be this.
“You up from Arkham, then?” the man in overalls asks, his words mumbled around the stem of a corncob pipe. Between the pipe and his accent, she’s having trouble understanding him. “They got lady professors down there now, do they?”
“One or two,” she replies, stepping nearer to the table. “It was dead when they found it?” she asks, and the constable nods and exchanges a glance with the man in overalls.
“Ayuh,” says the constable. “And if it hadn’t been, we’d have shot it.”
“You got a husband?” the man in overalls asks, and Immacolata ignores him. But she can’t help but be amused that they’re both so concerned with her sex that they’ve hardly seemed to give a second thought to her paleness or her smoked-lens spectacles. She sets her satchel down on an edge of the table and opens it, selecting from the array of items inside a pair of rubber gloves, forceps, and a stoppered bottle of sodium phenoxide. She pulls on the gloves.
“What are you a professor of?” the man in overalls wants to know.
“A doctor of anatomy,” the constable answers for her.
“That so?” the man in overalls asks.
“That’s very much so,” Immacolata says, speaking hardly above a whisper. It’s a good-enough lie. It’ll suffice until she’s done here.
The thing on the table is a biologist’s nightmare, clearly belonging to no known phylum of animals. The exoskeleton and jointed limbs suggest an arthropod, while the dorsal pair of membranous appendages might almost pass for stubby wings. The anterior limbs end in claws, like those of a crab, lobster, or crayfish. At the end of what she assumes is its neck, there is a bizarre ellipsoid organ, which she takes to be the head, sprouting fleshy tendrils that remind her of the tentacles of an anemone or sea cucumber. End to end, the creature measures just over 1.5 meters.
“You know what it is?” asks the constable.
“I don’t,” she says, and then uses the forceps to retract a leathery flap of skin located between two of the rows of tendrils.
“Would you venture a guess?”
“I’d prefer not to,” she tells him.
Beneath the flap is a sticky yellow mass, and she takes a sample, depositing it in an empty specimen bottle. Under the microscope, it’ll reveal structures reminiscent of the tellospores of certain Pucciniomycetes fungi, named rusts and smuts, but the resemblance will only be of the most general sort.
“You gonna buy it?” asks the man in overalls. He takes his pipe from his mouth, and she realizes he’s missing most of his front teeth.
“I wasn’t planning to,” she replies, returning the specimen bottle to her satchel. “With the roads out and the trains not running, there’s really no way I could get it back to Massachusetts, anyway.”
The man frowns, clearly disappointed, and then he returns the pipe to its place between his gums. “Ayuh,” he says. “Don’t suppose you could.”
“After I leave, I recommend you burn it.”
“Why should we do that?” asks the constable.
“Just to be safe. Better safe than sorry, right?”
She snips one of the tendrils and places it in another bottle, then proceeds to pour a few drops of the sodium phenoxide on the thing’s skin. There’s no reaction whatsoever, but she hadn’t expected there would be.