The Taint and Other Novellas (28 page)

Anne was at the water’s rim. Soaked from the waist down and shocked to her core—panting and gasping—she stared at the old man with her mouth wide open. And turning her head, looking out to sea, she said, “Geoff…Geoff!”

“Let’s get you home,” said Jamieson, taking her hand.

“But Geoff…what of Geoff?”

“We’ll call the coastguard.” The old man nodded reassuringly, and threw his jacket round her shoulders.

“He said…said he wasn’t ready.” She allowed him to lead her from the water.

“None of us were,” Jamieson muttered under his breath. “Not for this.”

Half-way up the beach toward the house, they heard a gurgling cry. It was Jilly White, staggering on the decking of her ocean-facing patio, one hand on the rail, the other pointing at the sky, the horizon, the sea, the beach…and finally at her daughter and Jamieson. Her drawn face went through a variety of changes; vacant one moment, it showed total horror in the next, and finally nothing as her eyes rolled up like white marbles.

Then, as her knees gave way beneath her, Jilly crumpled to the decking and lay there jerking, drooling, and mouthing incoherently…

• • •

The coastguard found no sign of Geoff, despite that their boat could be seen slicing through the off-shore water all that day, and then on Monday from dawn till dark. A doctor—a specialist from St. Austell—gave Jilly White a thorough examination, and during a quiet, private discussion with Jamieson out of earshot of Anne, readily agreed with the old man’s diagnosis. Of course Anne asked about it after the specialist had left, but Jamieson told her it could wait until all had settled down somewhat; and in any case things being as they were, for the moment incapable of improvement, Jilly’s best interests lay in resting. He, Jamieson himself, would remain in attendance, and with Anne’s help he would care for her mother until other decisions were made if such should become necessary.

In the event, however, the old man didn’t expect or receive too much help from Anne; no, for she was out on the beach, walking its length mile upon mile, watching the sea and only coming home to eat and sleep when she was exhausted. This remained her routine for four days, until Geoff’s bloated body was washed up on a shingle beach some miles down the coast.

Then Anne slept, and slept, a day and a night.

And the next morning—after visiting her mother’s bedside and finding her sleeping, however fitfully—Anne went to the old man in the hollow of her dune, and sat down with him in the sand on the first truly warm day of the year.

He was in shirt-sleeves, grey slacks, canvas shoes; dressed for the fine weather. And he had her book in his lap, unopened. Handing it over, he said, “I found it right here where you left it the other day. I was going to return it to you. You’re lucky no one else stumbled on it, and that it hasn’t rained.”

She took the heavy old book and put it down away from him, asking, “Did you look at it?”

He shook his head. “It’s your property. For all I know you might have written in it. I believe in privacy, both for myself and for others.”

She took his hand and leaned against him, letting him know that come what may they were friends. “Thank you for everything that you’ve done, especially for my mother,” she said. “I mean, I’m so glad you came here, to the village. Even knowing you
had
to come—” (a sly sideways glance at him,) “—still I’m glad. You’ve been here just a few months, yet I feel like I’ve known you, oh, for a very long time.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jamieson answered her.

“I feel I can talk to you,” she quickly went on. “I’ve felt that way since the first time I saw you. And after you treated Geoff when he was sick…well, then I knew it was so.”

“And indeed we do talk,” said the old man. “Nothing really deep, or not
too
deep, not yet—or until now?—but we talk. Perhaps it’s a question of trust, of a sort of kinship?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I know I can tell you things, secrets. I’ve needed to tell someone things. I’d like to have been able to tell my mother, but she wouldn’t have listened. Her nerves. She used to get worried, shake her head, walk away. Or rather, she would stumble away. Which has been getting worse every day. But you…you’re very different.”

He smiled. “Ah, well, but that’s always been my lot. As I believe I once told Jilly, sometimes I’m seen as a father confessor. Sort of odd, really, because I’m not a catholic.”

“Then what are you?” Anne tilted her head on one side. “I mean, what’s your religion? Are you an atheist?”

“Something like that.” Jamieson shrugged. “Actually, I do have certain beliefs. But I’m not one to believe in a conventional god, if that’s what you’re asking. And you? What do you believe in?”

“I believe in the things my father told me,” she answered dreamily. “Some beautiful things, some ugly, and some strange as the strangest myths and fables in the strangest books. But of course
you
know what I mean, even if I’m not sure myself.” As she spoke, she took up her book and hugged it to her chest. Bound in antique leather, dark as old oak and glossy with age, the book’s title, glimpsed between Anne’s spread fingers, consisted of just three ornately tooled letters: E.O.D.

“Well,” said Jamieson, “and here you are with just such a book. One of your strange books, perhaps? Certainly its title is very odd. Your mother once told me she gave you such books to burn…”

She looked at the book in her hands and said, “My father’s books? There were some she wanted rid of, yes. But I couldn’t just burn them. This is one of them. I’ve read them a lot and tried to make sense of them. Sometimes I thought I understood them; at others I was at a loss. But I knew they were important and now I know why.” And then, suddenly galvanized, gripping his arm below the elbow. “Can we please stop pretending? I know almost everything now…so won’t you please tell me the rest? And I swear to you—whatever you tell me—it will be safe with me. I think you must know that by now.”

The old man nodded and gently disengaged himself. “I think I can do that, yes. That is, as long as you’re not going to be frightened by it, and provided you won’t run away…like your father.”

“He was very afraid, wasn’t he?” she said. “But I’ll never understand why he stole the books and the Innsmouth jewellery. If he hadn’t taken them, maybe they’d have just let him go.”

“I think that perhaps he planned to sell those books,” the old man answered. “In order to support himself, naturally. For of course he would have known that they were very rare and valuable. But after he fled Innsmouth, changed his name, got back a little self-confidence and started to think clearly, he must also have realized that wherever the books surfaced they would be a sure link—a clue, a pointer—to his whereabouts. And so he kept them.”

“And yet he sold the jewellery.” She frowned.

“Because gold is different than books.” Jamieson smiled. “It becomes very personal; the people who buy jewellery wear it, of course, but they also guard it very closely and they don’t keep it on library shelves or places where others might wonder about it. Also, your father was careful not to spread it too thickly. Some here, some there; never too much in any one place. Perhaps at one time he’d reasoned that just like the books he shouldn’t sell the jewellery—but then came the time when he had to.”

“Yet the people of the Esoteric Order weren’t any too careful with it,” she said, questioningly.

“Because they consider Innsmouth their town and safe,” Jamieson answered. “And also because their members rarely betray a trust. Which in turn is because there are penalties for any who do.”

“Penalties?”

“There are laws, Anne. Doesn’t every society have laws?”

Her huge eyes studied his, and Jamieson felt the trust they conveyed…a mutual trust, passing in both directions. And he said, “So is there anything else I should tell you right now?”

“A great many things,” Anne answered, musingly. “It’s just that I’m not quite sure how to ask about them. I have to think things through.” But in the next moment she was alert again:

“You say my father changed his name?”

“Oh yes, as part of the merry chase he’s led us—led me—all these years. But the jewellery did in the end let him down. All winter long, when I’ve been out and about, I’ve been buying it back in the towns around. I have most of it now. As for your father’s name: actually, he wasn’t a White but a Waite, from a long line—a very,
very
long line—of Innsmouth Waites. One of his ancestors, and mine, sailed with Obed Marsh on the Polynesian trade routes. But as for myself…well, chronologically I’m a lot closer to those old seafarers than poor George was.”

She blinked, shook her head in bewilderment; the first time the old man had seen her caught unawares, which made him smile. And: “You’re a Waite, too?” she said. “But…Jamieson?”

“Well, actually it’s Jamie’s son.” He corrected her. “Jamie Waite’s son, out of old Innsmouth. Have I shocked you? Is it so awful to discover that the kinship you’ve felt is real?”

And after the briefest pause, while once again she studied his face: “No,” she answered, and shook her head. “I think I’ve probably guessed it—some of it—all along. And Geoff, poor Geoff…Why, it would also make you kin to him, and I think he knew it, too! It was in his eyes when he looked at you.”

“Geoff?” The old man’s face fell and he gave a sad shake of his head. “What a pity. But he was a hopeless case who couldn’t ever have developed fully. His gills were rudimentary, useless, unformed, atrophied. Atavisms, throwbacks in bloodlines that we hoped had been successfully conditioned out, still occur occasionally. That poor boy was in one such ‘state,’ trapped between his ancestral heritage and his—or his father’s—scientifically engineered or altered genes. And instead of cojoining, the two facets fought.”

“A throwback,” she said, softly. “What a horrible description!”

And the old man shrugged, sighed, and said, “Yes. Yet what else can we call him, the way Geoff was, and the way he looked? But one day, my dear, our ambassadors—our agents—will walk among people and look no different from them, and be completely accepted by them. Until eventually we Deep Ones will be the one race, the true amphibious race which nature always intended. We were the first…why, we
came
from the sea, the cradle of life itself! Given time, and the land and sea both shall be ours.”

“Ambassadors…” Anne repeated him, letting it all sink in. “But in actual fact agents. Spies and fifth columnists.”

“Our advance guard.” He nodded. “And who knows—you may be one of them? Indeed, that’s my intention.”

She stroked her throat, looked suddenly alarmed. “But Geoff and me, we were of an age, of a blood. And if his—his gills? —those flaps were gills? But…” Again she stroked her throat, searchingly now. Until he caught at her hand.

“Yours are on the inside, like mine. A genetic modification which reproduced itself perfectly in you, just as in me. That’s why your father’s desertion was so disappointing to us, and one of the reasons why I had to track him down: to see how he would spawn, and if he’d spawn true. In your case he did. In Geoff’s, he didn’t.”

“My gills?” Yet again she stroked her throat, and then remembered something. “Ah! My
laryngitis!
When my throat hurt last December, and you examined me! Two or three aspirins a day was your advice to my mother, and I should gargle four or five times daily with a spoonful of salt dissolved in warm water.”

“You wouldn’t let anyone else see you.” The old man reminded her. “And why was that, I wonder? Why me?”

“Because I didn’t
want
any other doctor looking at me,” she replied. “I didn’t want anyone else examining me. Just you.”

“Kinship,” he said. “And you made the right choice. But you needn’t worry. Your gills—at present the merest of pink slits at the base of your windpipe—are as perfect as in any foetal or infant land-born Deep One. And they’ll stay that way for…oh, a long time—as long or even longer than mine have stayed that way, and will until I’m ready—when they’ll wear through. For a month or so then they’ll feel tender as their development progresses, with fleshy canals like empty veins that will carry air to your land lungs. At which time you’ll be as much at home in the sea as you are now on dry land. And that will be
wonderful,
my dear!”

“You want me to…to come with you? To be a…a…?”

“But you already are! There’s a certain faint but distinct odour about you, Anne. Yes, and I have it, too, and so did your half-brother. But you can dilute it with pills we’ve developed, and then dispel it utterly with a dab of special cologne.”

A much longer silence, and again she took his bare forearms in her hands, stroking down from the elbow. His skin felt quite smooth in that direction. But when she stroked upwards from the wrist…

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I am. My skin is like yours…the scales don’t show. They’re fine and pink and golden. But if I’m to come with you, what of my mother? You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with her.”

And now, finally, after all these truths, the old man must tell a lie. He must, because the truth was one she’d never accept—or rather she would—and all faith gone. But there had been no other way. And so:

“Your mother,” the old man hung his head, averted his gaze, started again. “Your mother, your own dear Jilly…I’m afraid she won’t last much longer.” That much at least was the truth.

But Anne’s hand had flown to her mouth, and so he hurriedly continued. “She has CJD, Anne—Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease—the so-called mad cow disease, at a very advanced stage.” (That was another truth, but not the whole truth.)

Anne’s mouth had fallen open. “Does she know?”

“But how can I tell her? And how can you? She may never be herself again. And if or when she were herself, she would only worry about what will become of you. And there’s no way we can tell her about…well, you know what I mean. But Anne, don’t look at me like that, for there’s nothing that can be done for her. There’s no known cure, no hospital can help her. I wanted her to have her time here, with you. And of course I’m here to help in the final stages. That specialist from St. Austell, he agrees with me.”