Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Then came a new sound, deeper than deep, a slow eruption digging its way free of the drone, climbing in pitch, rising, rising, then plummeting back to leave her once more with the sound of the void. After moments of anticipation, it happened again, like a roar from an abyss, and prickled the fine hairs on the back of her neck—a primal response, but then, what was more primal than the ocean and the threats beneath its waves?

This was why she’d never liked the sea. This never knowing what was there, until it was upon you.

“Heard enough?” Escovedo asked, and seemed amused at her mute nod. “That happened. Their hive-mind behaviour coincided with that.”

“What was it?”

“That’s the big question. It was recorded several times during the summer of 1997, then never again. Since 1960, we’ve had the oceans bugged for sound, basically. We’ve got them full of microphones that we put there to listen for Soviet submarines, when we thought it was a possibility we’d be going to war with them. They’re down hundreds of feet, along an ocean layer called the sound channel. For sound conductivity, it’s the Goldilocks zone—it’s just right. After the Cold War was over, these mic networks were decommissioned from military use and turned over for scientific research. Whales, seismic events, underwater volcanoes, that sort of thing. Most of it, it’s instantly identifiable. The people whose job it is to listen to what the mics pick up, 99.99 per cent of the time they know exactly what they’ve got because the sounds conform to signature patterns, and they’re just so familiar.

“But every so often they get one they can’t identify. It doesn’t fit any known pattern. So they give it a cute name and it stays a mystery. This one, they called it the ‘Bloop’. Makes it sound like a kid farting in the bathtub, doesn’t it?”

She pointed at the speakers. “An awfully big kid and an awfully big tub.”

“Now you’re getting ahead of me. The Bloop’s point of origin was calculated to be in the South Pacific… maybe not coincidentally, not far from Polynesia, which is generally conceded as the place of origin for what eventually came to be known in Massachusetts as ‘the Innsmouth look’. Some outside influence was brought home from Polynesia in the 1800s during a series of trading expeditions by a sea captain named Obed Marsh.”

“Are you talking about a disease, or a genetic abnormality?”

Escovedo slapped one hand onto a sheaf of bound papers lying on one side of his desk. “You can be the judge of that. I’ve got a summary here for you to look over, before you get started tomorrow. It’ll give you more background on the town and its history. The whole thing’s a knotted-up tangle of fact and rumour and local legend and God knows what all, but it’s not my job to sort out what’s what. I’ve got enough on my plate sticking with facts, and the fact is, I’m in charge of keeping sixty-three of these proto-human monstrosities hidden from the world, and I know they’re cued into something anomalous, but I don’t know what. The other fact is, the last time they acted like this was fifteen years ago, while those mics were picking up one of the loudest sounds ever recorded on the planet.”

“How loud was it?”

“Every time that sound went off, it wasn’t just a local event. It was picked up over a span of five thousand kilometres.”

The thought made her head swim. Something with that much power behind it… there could be nothing good about it. Something that loud was the sound of death, of cataclysm and extinction events. It was the sound of an asteroid strike, of a volcano not just erupting, but vaporising a land-mass—Krakatoa, the island of Thera. She imagined standing here, past the north-western edge of the continental US, and hearing something happen in New York. Okay, sound travelled better in water than in air, but still—three thousand miles.

“Despite that,” Escovedo said, “the analysts say it most closely matches a profile of something alive.”

“A whale?” There couldn’t be anything bigger, not for millions of years.

The colonel shook his head. “Keep going. Somebody who briefed me on this compared it to a blue whale plugged in and running through the amplifier stacks at every show Metallica has ever played, all at once. She also said that what they captured probably wasn’t even the whole sound. That it’s likely that a lot of frequencies and details got naturally filtered out along the way.”

“Whatever it was… there have to be theories.”

“Sure. Just nothing that fits with all the known pieces.”

“Is the sound occurring again?”

“No. We don’t know what they’re cueing in on this time.”

He pointed at the prison. Even though he couldn’t see it, because there were no windows, and now she wondered if he didn’t prefer it that way. Block it out with walls, and maybe for a few minutes at a time he could pretend he was somewhere else, assigned to some other duty.

“But they do,” he said. “Those abominations over there know. We just need to find the key to getting them to tell us.”

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