Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Escovedo grunted a laugh. “Every chance I get.”

“Only he’s never acted on it. None of them have.”

“A fact that I can’t say distresses me.”

“It’s just …” she said, then shut up. She had her answer. They’d never bred. Wanted to, maybe felt driven to, but hadn’t. Perhaps captivity affected their fertility or short-circuited the urge from becoming action.

Or maybe it was just an incredible act of discipline. They had to realize what would happen to their offspring. They would never be allowed to keep them, raise them. Their children would face a future of tests and vivisection. Even monstrosities would want better for their babies.

“I have an observation to make,” Kerry said. “It’s not going to go any better tomorrow, or the day after that. Not if you want me to keep doing it like today. It’s like they have this shell around them.” She tipped the coffee to her lips and eyed him over the rim, and he was impossible to read. “Should I go on?”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re right, rapport takes time. But it takes more than that. Your prisoners may have something beyond human senses, but they still have human intellects. More or less. It feels overlaid with something else, and it’s not anything good, but fundamentally they haven’t stopped being human, and they need to be dealt with that way. Not like they’re entirely animals.”

She stopped a moment to gauge him, and saw that she at least hadn’t lost him. Although she’d not proposed anything yet.

“If they looked more human to you, don’t you think the way you’d be trying to establish rapport would be to treat them more like human beings?” she said. “I read the news. I watch TV. I’ve heard the arguments about torture. For and against. I know what they are. The main thing I took away is that when you consult the people who’ve been good at getting reliable information from prisoners, they’ll tell you they did it by being humane. Which includes letting the prisoner have something he wants or loves. There was a captured German officer in World War Two who loved chess. He opened up after his interrogator started playing chess with him. That’s all it took.”

“I don’t think these things are going to be interested in board games.”

“No. But there’s something every one of them wants,” she said. “There’s something they love more than anything else in the world.”

And why does it have to be the same thing I dread?

When she told him how they might be able to use that to their advantage, she expected Escovedo to say no, out of the question. Instead, he thought it over for all of five seconds and said yes.

“I don’t like it, but we need to fast-track this,” he said. “We don’t just eyeball their alignment in the pit, you know. We measure it with a laser. That’s how we know how precisely oriented they are. And since last night they’ve shifted. Whatever they’re cued in on has moved north.”

The next morning, dawn came as dawn should, the sky clear and the fog blown away and the sun an actual presence over the horizon. After two days of being scarcely able to see fifty feet in front of her, it seemed as if she could see forever. There was something joyously liberating in it. After just two days.

So what was it going to feel like for Barnabas Marsh to experience the ocean for the first time in more than eighty years? The true sea, not the simulation of it siphoned off and pumped into the pit. Restrained by a makeshift leash, yes, three riflemen ready to shoot from the shore, that too, three more ready to shoot from the parapet of the prison … but it would still be the sea.

That it would be Marsh they would try this with was inevitable. It might not be safe and they might get only one chance at this. He was cunning, she had to assume, but he was the oldest by far, and a direct descendant of the man who’d brought this destiny to Innsmouth in the first place. He would have the deepest reservoir of knowledge.

And, maybe, the arrogance to want to share it and gloat.

Kerry was waiting by the shallows when they brought him down, at one end of a long chain whose other end was padlocked to the frame of a four-wheel all-terrain cycle that puttered along behind him — he might have been able to throw men off balance in a tug-of-war, but not this.

Although he had plenty of slack, Marsh paused a few yards from the water’s edge, stopping to stare out at the shimmering expanse of sea. The rest of them might have seen mistrust in his hesitation, or savoring the moment, but neither of these felt right. Reacquainting , she thought. That’s it .

He trudged forward then, trailing chain, and as he neared the water, he cast a curious look at her, standing there in a slick blue wetsuit they’d outfitted her with, face-mask and snorkel in her hand. It gave him pause again, and in whatever bit of Marsh that was still human, she saw that he understood, realized who was responsible for this.

Gratitude, though, was not part of his nature. Once in the water, he vanished in moments, marked only by the clattering of his chain along the rocks.

She’d thought it wise to allow Marsh several minutes alone, just himself and the sea. They were midway through it when Escovedo joined her at the water’s edge.

“You sure you’re up for this?” he said. “It’s obvious how much you don’t like the idea, even if it was yours.”

She glanced over at Marsh’s chain, now still. “I don’t like to see anything captive when it has the capacity to lament its conditions.”

“That’s not what I mean. If you think you’ve been keeping it under wraps that you’ve got a problem with water, you haven’t. I could spot it two days ago, soon as we left the mainland behind.”

She grinned down at her flippers, sheepish. Busted. “Don’t worry. I’ll deal.”

“But you still know how to snorkel …?”

“How else are you going to get over a phobia?” She laughed, needing to, and it helped. “It went great in the heated indoor pool.”

She fitted the mask over her face and popped in the snorkel’s mouthpiece, and went in after Marsh. Calves, knees … every step forward was an effort, so she thought of Tabby. The sooner I get results, the quicker I’ll get home . Thighs, waist … then she was in Marsh’s world, unnerved by the fear that she would find him waiting for her, tooth and claw, ready to rip through her in a final act of defiance.

But he was nowhere near her. She floated facedown, kicking lightly and visually tracking the chain down the slope of the shoreline, until she saw it disappear over a drop-off into a well that was several feet deeper. There he is . She hovered in place, staring down at Marsh as he luxuriated in the water. Ecstatic — there was no other word for him. Twisting, turning, undulating, the chain only a minor impediment, he would shoot up near the surface, then turn and plunge back to the bottom, rolling in the murk he stirred up, doing it again, again, again. His joyous abandon was like a child’s.

He saw her and stilled, floating midway between surface and sand, a sight from a nightmare, worse than a shark because even in this world he was so utterly alien.

And it was never going to get any less unnerving. She sucked in a deep breath through the snorkel, then plunged downward, keeping a bit of distance between them as she swam to the bottom.

Two minutes and then some — that was how long she could hold her breath.

Kerry homed in on a loose rock that looked heavy enough to counter her buoyancy, then checked the dive compass strapped to her wrist like an oversized watch. She wrestled the wave-smoothed stone into her lap and sat cross-legged on the bottom, matching as precisely as she could the latest of the southwesterly alignments that had so captivated Marsh and the other sixty-two of them. Sitting on the seabed with the Pacific alive around her, muffled in her ears and receding into a blue-green haze, as she half expected something even worse than Marsh to come swimming straight at her out of the void.