Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Here is my problem: Tilly seemed willing. She is almost eighteen—yes, we keep them here longer, if they wish. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Some stay on and become staff, studying, learning from the teachers here, which gives them a far better training than they would find elsewhere. Here is my other problem: the possibility of Thackeray revealing what may have happened between us, but which I am unsure even took place. And Tilly, she is a child, easily influenced.

Who do I protect? Myself or the child?

I don’t know what I will tell the Head. Candide will be useless; he will simply give me a slow blink and ask whatever do you mean? The Principal is the key. When we meet I will know what to say.

V

FEBRUARY 16TH

Look not upon me, because I am disguised,

because the sun hath burned me:

Earth’s children were angry with me;

they stole what was mine;

They kept him from me.

The west wing houses the library; it’s stacked with shelving and desks overrun by computer terminals and printers. A wooden set of card-index drawers stands lonely and lost in the middle of the room—the young librarian doesn’t know quite what to do with it and is too afraid of the ghosts of librarians past to throw it out. Curiosities abound: a giraffe’s skeleton, a giant cephalopod, spears and shields and helmets of disappeared empires, bronze horse statuettes, elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns, all take up space on walls, shelves, nooks and alcoves. There are portraits, too: long-dead educators staring down with what might be disapproval or hauteur or both.

The only wall unencumbered by shelves or display items is covered by a tapestry. A woman sits enthroned on a stone seat, a staff in one hand, a snake in the other. Her eyes are wide, almost too much so: icthyoid and protuberant; her lips pouting, her nose somewhat flat; hair a mess of black; yet there is a kind of beauty to her, a compelling strangeness that draws the observer in. She wears a simple green robe, something that seems almost armoured, perhaps scaled, and at her slippered feet, a field of blossoms: black, silver, red, yellow and richest chestnut petals on stalks of green. She sits most closely to the left of the tapestry—or rather, to the right—and to the right, or rather her left, nothing more than a verdant tangle of forest. Branches and trunks, undergrowth and vines, all twist together to form a dense curtain, seemingly without uniformity or plan, utterly wild and overgrown, curled around the stony ruins of a building crushed by the foliage.

In a quiet corner of the room sits Fenella, surrounded and almost concealed by a fortress of books built on the desk in front of her. At one of the tables are Tilly and Stephen and their various acolytes; I note the blonde curly head turn towards me, offering a smile, but I pretend not to see her, keep myself aimed directly at my friend.

“Have you seen the Head?” I ask, sotto voce, as I scratch at the sides of my throat, trying to get rid of the terrible itching there. She jumps, pulled from her concentration by my question, both hands thumping on the tabletop in fright.

“Don’t you knock?” One of the book towers wobbles and begins a slow slide. She tries to stop it, then gives up and lets the tomes fan out, domino-like, until the final one teeters on the edge and falls. It marks the end of its descent with a noise like a shot that stops the library for a few moments.

Fenella folds her arms and looks at me.

I ask again, “Have you seen the Head?”

“This morning,” she says. “What is wrong with you?”

And she’s right, I’m jumpy, sweating, twitching at the slightest noise, the tiniest hints of something moving in the corner of my eye. There’s still the headache: as if someone is trying to crack my skull open. And I cannot shake the accompanying sense that success will result in a dark river, a black tide flowing out of me. I blink, hard, eyes dry.

“I don’t feel well,” I say. “And…”

She puts a hand on my forehead—the cool flesh is a shock against my hot skin. “Go and lie down. You don’t have any classes this afternoon.”

“Thackeray,” I say, the words becoming harder to force out, the hurt pressing in on my head. “Thackeray and Tilly, were…”

She tilts; the whole room tilts and I can’t figure out why. I wonder that the books aren’t falling from the shelves; then I realise I’m the one who’s on an angle. I’m the one who’s falling. I hit the floor, head bouncing against the polished parquetry.