Caleb and I, who wake every day shocked by hills and mist and the scent of salt, vacillate among extremes. I walk for hours with aching feet, testing my reclaimed strength and reveling in streets full of strangers, then in a moment find myself clutched by panic to realize my brother’s out of sight. Caleb clings to me all night, drawing Kevin into our tangle when the boy wakes with nightmares, then screams at everyone when he finds an orange going bad in a bowl of precious fruit.
After a month of freedom, Mama Rei has regular business taking in mending. Anna finds work at the laundromat. And I walk into a bookstore with a help wanted sign in the window and stand utterly still, forgetting my purpose entirely amid the heady scent, until the proprietor asks impatiently what I want.
“I have to go back,” Caleb tells us at dinner. There’s fresh salmon, rolled with rice and seaweed, to celebrate Anna’s and my newfound work. It tastes of home and freedom and strangeness, and I push down memories as I eat.
“Back where?” Mama Rei asks. But I know what he’s tasted.
“You want to go back to Innsmouth,” I say. “Caleb, there’s nothing there.”
“You don’t know that,” he says. “Someone must have taken our books, looted our houses. The elders might still be around, too.” It’s hard to imagine: that anyone would wait for us so long, that they wouldn’t blame us for surviving. “Someone needs to go back and look.”
“By yourself?” I ask. I put down my chopsticks, suddenly queasy as I imagine things we’ve lost, things that would be more achingly familiar than the raw fish.
But he nods, and I can see his relief at admitting it. “I need to be alone for a while. I need to find out what’s still there.”
*
We were getting close to the church. Caleb craned his neck, blinking rapidly at the white-tipped crenellations. “Whatever we’re doing—I still want to save our books. Even if there are no children to learn from them.”
“Agreed,” I said, though it hurt to think of them going unused.
“We need help. The elders care about the knowledge those books hold, but I don’t think they really care about them as artifacts. They’re willing to put them aside. Maybe it’s Trumbull we should be talking to, if we want someone who cares about the journals, and the marginalia, and the family records inside the covers.”
“You want us to ask that for a favor?”
“By that, do you mean the ancient intelligence who cares little for our petty mortal concerns? Or do you mean the Yith who does what we’ve always known they do to survive, and has the nerve not to be ashamed of it? Because I don’t like those things either, but we may as well use the ‘Great Ones’ as people always have—deference and indulgence in exchange for legacy. She’s the one who got us into the library in the first place—even if only as a means to see the books herself. They must have a place to store records locally. Perhaps with one of their cults. I don’t really care, as long as they let us in without reservation, and as long as Innsmouth’s books are out of the hands of the thieves who stole them.”
I started to speak, trailed off as rebuttals failed to coalesce. All I had was the gut horror of what Trumbull had told us—I did not want to ask her for help.
He switched to R’lyehn: “It shows something about humans that we depend on the Yith for remembrance, but turn deaf to the cost until they say it plainly to our ears. Then we prate of scandal and horror. You don’t actually dislike the idea, you just don’t like how it tastes. You need to figure out what you really want, and what that’s worth.” He paused, and said more quietly. “We need to figure it out. With Audrey and Charlie. The three of you are all I’m sure of right now, odd as it seems—and if we don’t act together, I don’t think we’ll succeed at any endeavor.”
“You…” I wasn’t going to put it off, as he had with Dawson. “You’re right, I think. I’ll meditate on it and we’ll talk, all of us. And I’ll think on Trumbull, too. Maybe it’s wrong of me to be repulsed by what she said—or maybe it’s wrong not to have been repulsed before.”
“Of course we should be repulsed. But we have no control over who the Yith sacrifice. We do have control—a very little—over what redeems that loss. What’s remembered and preserved. I won’t be forgotten, or have our parents forgotten, because I wish the Yith had found another way.”
We stopped outside the church door. “Two days ago you wanted nothing to do with Trumbull, and were ready to let the land burn.”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m still angry. But if I’m not dying, I don’t have the luxury of letting that anger cloud my judgment.”
“Do you want to come in?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
The church’s gas-lit interior was only a little warmer than the snow outside. The air within was still, held in place by stone and stained glass, broken only by a faint trail of cool wind as I passed the center aisle.
No one else moved in the building. Any night in Innsmouth, a priest would have tended the temple: ensuring all was right with the altars and statues, waiting for congregants who might need a thoughtful ear. Dusk brings questions, and when darkness falls it’s a poor time to be alone with them.
I was glad enough for the solitude, this time—I would hardly have asked the archpriest for advice on the confusion he himself had raised.
I settled in the god’s embrace, and lit the altar candle.
It’s common to meditate on the gods and their functions—though any priest would tell you those functions, the personalities claimed for them, the divisions among different species of deity, are simplified for the understanding of the young, with the priests themselves very much included in that category. There’s risk in defining the indefinable. Still, the stories serve purposes: guides for worship, mnemonics for virtues and fears, ways to consider the unknowable without being entirely overwhelmed.
I?, Dagon, guardian of waters, steadfast. And yet absent from Innsmouth when needed.
I?, Hydra, defender of waters, fierce. And absent too—here I could imagine Her well enough to feel bitter about that, as I could not in the museum. It had been a while since I’d prayed to Innsmouth’s presumed patrons at any length.
I?, Cthulhu, bringer of life and death, ever patient. I’d always felt most comfortable with the Sleeping God, and more so now. Cthulhu listens, and never promises aid that cannot be forthcoming.
I?, Nyarlathotep, herald of knowledge. A favorite of the Yith. But I considered the psychopomp’s customary role: showing the path to what was hidden, ensuring that wisdom could never be fully censored or forbidden or lost. I imagined a black-robed figure treading the echoing floors of the library, entering the stacks that Miskatonic’s guardians thought theirs alone, and smiling. Of course, it would as smilingly open those doors for Russian spies as for us. Nyarlathotep doesn’t play favorites, or try to protect anyone from the consequences of newfound knowledge.
I?, Yog-Sothoth, maker and keeper of gates.