She Walks in Shadows(60)

Anna doesn’t know how she can go back home. How she can ever step into a laboratory again. She thinks all samples of funny, harmless Halophile cthulhu should be burned to ash.

It doesn’t thrive in sewage, she tells herself time and time again. Nor in brackish water, nor sea water.

Then she thinks of the vast Dead Sea.





NOTES FOUND IN A DECOMMISSIONED ASYLUM, DECEMBER 1961

Sharon Mock

THE MAN IN the blue suit says this is a hospital, but I know better.

They give me a room to myself. It is large, but all it has is a bed. No headboard, no footboard, no table, no chair. Fluorescent tubes that switch on and off through no will of my own. One small window, glass and chicken wire, so high up all I can see is the sky. If I need to use the bathroom, I will have to pound on the door and hope the guard notices.

This is all for my protection, the man in the blue suit assures me. I have experienced a trauma. I must be held for observation. So many large words, as though syllables will hide the truth.

They brought me here in the back of a delivery van. Across from me slept the man who had tried to kill me. Until he woke up. Until he opened his eyes and opened his mouth and cursed my name and blasphemed my blasphemous salvation.

They told me I was safe. They pointed out that his arms and body were firmly restrained, bound to the van’s steel walls.

Problem was, so were mine.



The walls, thick gray stone, swallow sound. But when I shut my eyes, I hear everything. There is a woman who laughs immoderately and demands cigarettes from the orderlies. There are men whose minds race, men whose thoughts are a plate of scrambled eggs spilled on the floor. There is a boy who throws blocks and dreams of fire.

Below all this, I hear Bill’s voice. Muffled and slurred, as though from very far away. He calls out in his drugged and frenzied slumber, repeating those same foolish words he cried out as he tried to kill me.

He calls out to you, I think in an unguarded moment. Will you go to him?

I tell myself the laughter in my head is my own. Isn’t it true now, either way?

There is a procession in my head, where dreams used to go. A mummer’s dance, full of black gloss and fairy lights and lurid color. When I try to see more clearly, it evaporates, twists into the faces of angry men.

I am too young, too new to this. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Forgive me.

Near dawn, Bill’s voice roars loud in my head, then suddenly stops. I jam my fist in my mouth to keep from crying, in case anybody is watching. I know what has happened. The drugs have worn off and Bill has taken his life.

I don’t want to know how, but I’m sure the man in the blue suit will tell me.



You is such a useful word. It can apply to anything. Male, female, singular, plural: any, all, or none of these. It implies nothing, save the familiarity of direct address.

It would be nice if there were a third-person pronoun like that. So useful. Maybe there’s something in another language that will serve. I resolve to research the matter more fully when I get free from this place.



“He tore out his carotid with his own fingernails,” the man in the blue suit says. “His throat. The veins in his throat. Do you understand?”

He has a name, not just a suit. He gave it to me the night before, when the rescuers brought us in. I refuse to remember it.

“I didn’t need to know that.” I’d just reminded him that Bill was not just my fellow student, not just my companion. He was my fiancé.

“You don’t seem that upset.”

How am I supposed to respond to that? I make the mistake of closing my eyes to collect my thoughts and my head fills with everybody’s thoughts but my own.

I open my eyes and tell the truth. “It’s all ... overwhelming,” I say. “And I’d rather not cry on your shoulder right now.”

The man scribbles nonsense on a yellow notepad. “Very self-collected.” He sounds proud of himself. “Why don’t you tell me again what happened the night of the 14th?”

I tell him the same thing I did the previous afternoon. The same thing, more or less, I told the responders, though I was not much for talking at the time.

We drove up from Boston that morning on short notice to investigate an archeological site that Bill’s advisor had learned about from sources he didn’t discuss. Because of the short notice the team was just Bill and myself, borrowed from the sociology department. I sat in the back and got carsick while Bill and Dr. Davis discussed matters in voices pitched too low for me to hear over the rumbling engine.

We arrived on the island in the afternoon, made camp in a farmer’s field at the edge of some woods. I wondered why we didn’t stay at the motor lodge down the road, but didn’t ask. I didn’t want to cause a fuss. While Bill and I set up the tents, Dr. Davis went to scout out the site.

It was starting to get dark and the Professor still wasn’t back, so we went looking for him —

“Both of you? And your colleague agreed to this?” the man in the suit asks, as though he’s caught me in something. All I say is Yes. In fact, we’d argued about it, but he doesn’t need to know that.

We found a hole in the woods. A tunnel, sloping, down under the base of the slate cliffs. Bill went first. He wouldn’t let me come along. I watched him for a long time, until I couldn’t see him in the darkness, only the light of his lantern.