“No. It’s tedious.”
I considered what I might learn from her, given the opportunity. But it was late, and when I cast about I found only the past that I should not ask about, and trivial concerns. “When the original Trumbull gets her body back, will she be startled to find that she has a professorship at Miskatonic?”
“Don’t be foolish.” She ran a finger down her sleeve, as if suddenly noticing the body she wore. “Our hosts must possess great mental capacity, or the exchange would be much less fruitful.”
“It takes more than intelligence for a woman to gain such a position.”
“This is true.” She smiled at her hand, almost fondly. “I find that hosts with a degree of tenacity and”—she paused, considering—“resilience, yes, resilience, make for a more comfortable exchange. Such minds are less likely to waste their time in the Archives on distressed mewling. Also, they are less likely to flood one’s home body with stress chemicals. I don’t like to find my limbs twitching at every statue.”
“That makes sense.”
She looked at me pityingly. “Of course it does.”
I cursed myself for tediousness. “Excuse me. I’d best get back to bed.”
“Certainly. You are young, after all.”
“Isn’t everyone, by your standards?”
She frowned at a manuscript and moved it to a different pile. “Your subspecies lives to a reasonable age. Long enough to learn their arts with some proficiency.”
I made it almost to the hall before I gave in to the question. Turning back, I demanded: “Did you know what would happen to my people?”
“The generalities, certainly. If there are specifics you wish recorded in the archives, you might write them up for me.”
“That’s not what I meant. Would some warning of the raid have been too tedious an oracle for you to give?” I winced even as I said it. My parents would have been appalled to hear me take such a tone with such an entity.
When she turned around, she did not appear appalled or even startled. “I met the last sane K’n-yan, after her people became the Mad Ones Under the Earth. She demanded the same thing of me. Her name was Beneer.”
It was neither explanation nor excuse, yet the anger drained out of me, to be replaced by all-too-familiar mourning. At this time of night I would gladly have traded it back.
“I?, the Great Race,” I said tiredly. “Please don’t use my name as an object lesson for the last ck’chk’ck. It will not please her.” And I returned to the guest bed, as I ought to have earlier. When I dreamt of lying parched on a bed amid empty desert, I did not bother to wake myself.
CHAPTER 6
Trumbull had a morning faculty meeting in preparation for the coming semester—her teaching style, I suspected, would be frightening to behold—but the rest of us were due to gather in the library after breakfast. As much as I’d wanted to be here, I couldn’t yet face returning to that darkened building and reading our own books under the librarian’s judgmental eye. Instead, seeking strength in the manner that had become my habit since leaving the camp, I went for a walk. Neko, after a long look at the snow, offered to meet the others and give them my regrets and my promise of a later reunion.
As Neko had said earlier, I walked because I could. The air smelled clean and crisp. It would have been too dry save that gusts periodically tossed snow aloft from the branches and drifts. I plucked an icicle from Trumbull’s fencepost and sucked on it as I walked.
Arkham was not much larger than Innsmouth save for the college buildings, but it was more urbane and attracted more visitors. The streets seemed full of strangers, not only to me but to each other. As I put space between myself and the campus, I witnessed few casual encounters. People shuffled briskly, chins buried in thick coats.
In San Francisco, I had neighbors who knew my name and did not despise me, friends and adoptive family who knew and loved me. But I had no one who understood what I was, where I came from. The gambrel roofs and sagging Victorians of Arkham, the streets hemmed in by snow, invoked memories of Innsmouth, where we required no effort to understand each other’s ways.
I wandered for some while. I knew my self-pity for indulgence, and yet the walking was itself a comfort. The rhythm of my steps, the feel of breath and muscle, drew me slowly from my ruminations to a more meditative state. My awareness spread, or narrowed, so that I now saw the houses beside me, the people hurrying on purposeful errands, the snowbanks and trees and parks, and not the imagined houses and people and snow and trees of Innsmouth.
I became aware of the rumble and hiss of flowing water. Following the welcome sound brought me to the Garrison Street Bridge over the Miskatonic River. Here, clapboard houses lined the precipitous bank. Porches jutted over the water, leaning downstream. Just past the bridge, the river widened and slowed, and a small island marked where the calmer flow had dropped detritus over the years. It was a spot of pure white land and charcoal-sketch trees amid the kaleidoscope of bobbing ice.
The river smelled less welcoming than it sounded. Acids and lye from the upstream textile mills assaulted me, and some inner instinct warned me that they would burn gills and clog lungs. My neck muscles clenched in as-yet-useless protective reflex.
At the cusp of the bridge, one old house had installed a waterwheel. It no longer turned, but it had been brightly painted in blue and orange, like the wheel of the steamboat in my childhood copy of Huckleberry Finn. (Which I had forgotten to put on the list.) A wide porch, sturdier than most, wrapped around the building, laid out with tables and chairs. These now stood empty and slick with icemelt, but the entrance marked the place as The Book Mill, and Open.
A bell sounded as I entered: chimes, deeper and more somber than the usual jangle. I inhaled the familiar scent of old paper and leather and the vanilla-edged whiff of pipe smoke. The bones of whatever had been here before were brighter and more spacious than Charlie’s store. It still felt like home. I realized that what most distressed me about Miskatonic’s library, what had kept me away all morning despite my love for the collection entombed there, was the absence of that expected comfort.
Voices rose on the far side of the shelves. I followed them to an alcove jutting over the river, where a portion of the store had been given over to a small café. Clusters of sleek young people sat amid coffee cups and half-eaten pastries and cigarette stubs and open books. They leaned close or tilted their chairs, avid in their discussions.
One of the boys saw me and grinned. “Hi! What’s this?”
I froze, and put a hand on the nearest shelf to steady myself.
“She’s not from Hall,” said one girl. Turning to another, she added, “That’s a face you wouldn’t forget.”