Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Once the helicopter had set down on the island, Kerry hadn’t even left the cabin before thinking she’d never been to a more miserable place in her life. Rocky and rain-lashed, miles off the mainland, it was buffeted by winds that snapped from one direction and then another, so that the pines that grew here didn’t know which way to go, twisted until they seemed to lean and leer with ill-intent.

“It’s not always like this,” Escovedo assured her. “Sometimes there’s sleet, too.”

It was the size of a large shopping plaza, a skewed triangular shape, with a helipad and boat dock on one point, and a scattering of outbuildings clustered along another, including what she assumed were offices and barracks for those unfortunate enough to have been assigned to duty here, everything laced together by a network of roads and pathways.

It was dominated, though, by a hulking brick monstrosity that looked exactly like what it was—a vintage relic of a prison—although it could pass for other things, too: an old factory or power plant, or, more likely, a wartime fortress, a leftover outpost from an era when the west coast feared the Japanese fleet. It had been built in 1942, Escovedo told her. No one would have questioned the need for it at the time, and since then, people were simply used to it, if they even knew it was there. Boaters might be curious, but the shoreline was studded at intervals with signs, and she imagined that whatever they said was enough to repel the inquisitive—that, and the triple rows of fencing crowned with loops of razor wire.

Inside her rain slicker, Kerry yanked the hood’s drawstring tight and leaned into the needles of rain. October—it was only October. Imagine this place in January. Of course it didn’t bother the colonel one bit. They were halfway along the path to the outbuildings when she turned to him and tugged the edge of her hood aside.

“I’m not psychic,” she told him. “You called me that in the helicopter. That’s not how I look at what I do.”

“Noted,” he said, noncommittal and unconcerned.

“I’m serious. If you’re going to bring me out here, to this place, it’s important to me that you understand what I do, and aren’t snickering about it behind my back.”

“You’re here, aren’t you? Obviously somebody high up the chain of command has faith in you.”

That gave her pause to consider. This wouldn’t have been a lark on their part. Bringing in a civilian on something most presidents hadn’t known about would never have been done on a hunch—see if this works, and if it doesn’t, no harm done. She would’ve been vetted, extensively, and she wondered how they’d done it. Coming up with pretences to interview past clients, perhaps, or people who’d appeared on The Animal Whisperer, to ascertain that they really were the just-folks they were purported to be, and that it wasn’t scripted; that she genuinely had done for them what she was supposed to.

“What about you, though? Have you seen the show?”

“I got forwarded the season one DVDs. I watched the first couple episodes.” He grew more thoughtful, less official. “The polar bear at the Cleveland Zoo, that was interesting. That’s 1,500 pounds of apex predator you’re dealing with. And you went in there without so much as a stick of wood between you and it. Just because it was having OCD issues? That takes either a big pair of balls or a serious case of stupid. And I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“That’s a start, I guess,” she said. “Is that particular episode why I’m here? You figured since I did that, I wouldn’t spook easily with these prisoners of yours?”

“I imagine it was factored in.” The gravel that lined the path crunched underfoot for several paces before he spoke again. “If you don’t think of yourself as psychic, what is it, then? How does it work?”

“I don’t really know.” Kerry had always dreaded the question, because she’d never been good at answering it. “It’s been there as far back as I can remember, and I’ve gotten better at it, but I think that’s just through the doing. It’s a sense as much as anything. But not like sight or smell or taste. I compare it to balance. Can you explain how your sense of balance works?”

He cut her a sideways glance, betraying nothing, but she saw he didn’t have a clue. “Mine? You’re on a need-to-know basis here, remember.”

Very good. Very dry. Escovedo was probably more fun than he let on.

“Right,” she said. “Everybody else’s, then. Most people have no idea. It’s so intrinsic they take it for granted. A few may know it has to do with the inner ear. And a few of them, that it’s centred in the vestibular apparatus, those three tiny loops full of fluid. One for up, one for down, one for forward and backward. But you don’t need to know any of that to walk like we are now and not fall over. Well… that’s what the animal thing is like for me. It’s there, but I don’t know the mechanism behind it.”

He mused this over for several paces. “So that’s your way of dodging the question?”

Kerry grinned at the ground. “It usually works.”