Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

He slides the manuscript back across his desk to Lacey, seventeen double-spaced pages held together with a green plastic paper clip; she nods once, reading over the text again silently to herself. Her eyes drift across his wispy, red pencil marks: a missing comma here, there a spelling or date she should double-check.

“That’s not true,” Lacey says.

“What’s not true?”

“That no one but you cares any more.”

“No? Well, maybe not. But, please, allow me the conceit.”

“Dr. Hanisak still thinks the name’s too fanciful. She said I should have called it something more descriptive. She suggested Eocarpus.”

“Of course she did. Hanisak has all the imagination of a stripped wing nut,” and the palaeontologist slips his pipe back between his ivory-yellow teeth.

“Grendelonyx innsmouthensis,” Lacey whispers, and it does taste good, the syllables smooth as good brandy.

“See? There you are. ‘Grendel’s claw from Innsmouth,’” Jasper Morgan mutters around his pipe. “What the hell could be more descriptive than that?”

Across campus, the steeple chimes begin to ring the hour—nine, ten, ten and three-quarters—later than Lacey had realised and she frowns at her watch, not ready to leave the sanctuary of the office and his company.

“Shit. I’ll miss my train if I don’t hurry,” she says.

“Wish I were going with you. Wish I could be there to see their faces.”

“I know, but I’ll be fine. I’ll call as soon as I get to New Haven,” and she puts the manuscript back inside its folder and returns it to the battered black leather satchel that also holds her iBook and the CD with all the slides for the presentation, the photographs and cladograms, her character matrix and painstaking line drawings. Then Dr. Morgan smiles and shakes her hand, like they’ve only just met this morning, like it hasn’t been years, and he sees her to the door. She carries the satchel in one hand and the sturdy cardboard box in the other. Last night she transferred the fossil from its original box to this one, replaced the excelsior with cotton and foam-rubber padding. Her future in this box, her box of wonders, and “Knock em dead, kiddo,” he says and hugs her, wraps her tight in the reassuring scents of his tobacco and aftershave lotion, and Lacey hugs him back twice as hard.

“Don’t you go losing that damned thing. That one’s going to make you famous,” he says and points at the cardboard box.

“Don’t worry. It’s not going to leave my sight, not even for a minute.”

A few more words, encouragement and hurried last thoughts, and then Lacey walks alone down the long hallway past classrooms and tall display cabinets, doors to other offices, and she doesn’t look back.

* * *

“I couldn’t find it on the map,” she said, watching the man’s callused, oil-stained hands as he counted out her change, the five dollars and two nickels that were left of the twenty after he’d filled the Jeep’s tank and replaced a windshield-wiper blade.

“Ain’t on no maps,” the man said. “Not no more. Ain’t been on no maps since sometime way back in the ’30s. Wasn’t much left to put on a map after the Feds finished with the place.”

“The Feds?” she asked. “What do they have to do with Innsmouth?” and the man stepped back from the car and eyed her more warily than before. Tall man with stooped shoulders and gooseberry-grey eyes, a nose that looked like it’d been broken more than once; he shrugged and shook his head.

“Hell, I don’t know. You hear things, that’s all. You hear all sorts of things. Most of it don’t mean shit.”

Lacey glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard, then up at the low purple-black clouds sailing by, the threat of more rain and nightfall not far behind it. Most of the day wasted on the drive from Amherst, a late start in a downpour, then a flat tyre on the Cambridge Turnpike, a flat tyre and a flat spare, and by the time she made Cape Ann it was almost four o’clock.

“What business you got up at Innsmouth, anyhow?” the man asked suspiciously.

“I’m a scientist,” she said. “I’m looking for fossils.”

“Is that a fact? Well, ma’am, I never heard of anyone finding any sort of fossils around here.”

“That’s because the rocks are wrong. All the rocks around the Cape are igneous and—”

“What’s that mean, ‘igneous’?” he interrupts, pronouncing the last word suspiciously, like it’s something that might bite if he’s not careful.

“It means they formed when molten rock—magma or lava— cooled down and solidified. Around here, most of the igneous rocks are plutonic, which means they solidified deep underground.”

“I never heard of no volcanoes around here.”

“No,” Lacey says. “There aren’t any volcanoes around here, not now. It was a very long time ago.”

The man watched her silently for a moment, rubbed at his stubbly chin as if trying to make up his mind whether or not to believe her.

“All these granite boulders around here, those are igneous rock. For fossils, you usually need sedimentary rocks, like sandstone or limestone.”