Fathomless (22 page)

“Why?” Eddy said.

“My father doesn't want me learning about my Deep One half.”

Eddy beat Sean to the big-money word in that sentence: “Half?”

“Sure. I'm half human, too. A hybrid. How Deep Ones and humans could, well, interbreed—that's one of the genuine facts in Lovecraft's story.”

“Then Deep Ones and humans must be the same species, or at least subspecies! Otherwise, they couldn't have children.”

Daniel's laugh was sharp edged. “Way, way back, they were probably related, yeah. There's something more going on. Geldman explained it to me and my father. Deep One DNA is mutable. Not just the usual way, through mutations—in a Deep One sperm or egg cell, it can rearrange itself to mimic human DNA, boom, now the species are interfertile. But the rearranged Deep One DNA still has these dormant trigger genes. The hybrid looks human until the trigger genes kick in and start rearranging the DNA back to Deep One. Usually it starts at twenty, twenty-five years old, but it can start earlier. Like with me.”

“How early?” Sean said.

“When I was fourteen, this happened.” Daniel held up both hands and spread his fingers wide. From their bases to the first joints, pinkish skin stretched. Fine capillaries infiltrated the translucent webbing; when Sean squinted, he could see them pulsing. “It's the same between my toes.”

“But you only had scars there this morning,” Eddy whispered.

“This is how my hands looked just before I came to Geldman. See, the Change is mostly a biological process. It moves slow. Geldman's treating me with magic, which moves a lot faster. But if I immerse myself in water, especially seawater, his magic's blown, and everything reverts to where it was before his treatments.”

“So today, when you jumped in after that kid,” Sean began.

When he faltered, awe-smacked by the double courage of Daniel's action, Eddy finished: “You knew what would happen.”

“Well, you both saw. The water ripped open the skin that was starting to seal my gills. That let me breathe through them while I dived. But now—” Daniel dropped his hands to his knees, closing the fingers tight, hiding the webs. “The Change has started again.”

Eddy got up and sat on the edge of the tea table, another move closer to Daniel. Candle flame licked the tuft of her braid without setting it on fire, but for his own peace of mind, Sean pulled the offending candelabra toward him. “So Geldman's treatments are to reverse your Change?” he said.

“Reverse it. Keep it from starting again. I take, like, five different potions every day, and they have to be made fresh, so Geldman's going to teach me how to compound them for myself. I'm already helping Cybele make my, um, cologne.”

The cologne that had teased Sean's memory for so long with its scent of fresh-mown grass and herbs. “It's Cybele's Number One! The stuff Helen put on her Servitor burns.”

“Close, but that's a healing balm. Mine's liquid, a spray.” Daniel coughed, eyed Eddy. “And it's not really cologne. It's a deodorant. If I didn't use it every day, I'd smell like a Changer, and nobody'd want to come within a mile of me.”

It was Sean's turn to jolt forward from the cradling cushions of his chair. “You'd smell?”

“I'd reek, like a dead fish.”

“And, um, like gym clothes that've been smooshed in the bottom of your locker too long?”

“You could put it that way.”

Eddy realized where Sean was heading. She scowled at him. “You're thinking about Mr. Haddock.”

Why not, with his stink and his flipper-sized feet and the way he zipped his Windbreaker collar up over his neck, maybe for the same reason Daniel had worn the brace? “He fits Daniel's description, how you can't come within a mile of him.”

Daniel sighed. “Yeah, you and Eddy might as well know it now. Mr. Haddock's a Changer, a hybrid turning into a Deep One. I was pretty sure, and Geldman confirmed it. He's been watching the guy, too, how he shows up at Tumblebee's whenever I'm due at the pharmacy. How he follows me sometimes when I leave.”

“He really does?” Eddy said. “We weren't just being paranoid?”

“Not according to Geldman.”

“And he was at the beach today,” Sean put in. “Watching you on the jetty. He's the one who gave me your neck brace and shoes from off the jetty. He knew I was your friend.”

Eddy hugged her upper arms to her sides. “I didn't like Mr. Haddock before. Now I'm really creeped out.”

Daniel's lips tightened. “I guess I must creep you out, too, then.”

She stared at him blankly.

“Because if it weren't for Mr. Geldman and Cybele, I'd look and smell like Mr. Haddock. Or worse. By now, I'd be totally Changed.”

The way Eddy flushed and stammered, she hadn't at all realized how Daniel might misunderstand her. “No, Daniel! I didn't mean because he was a—a Changer. I'm creeped out because of how he's following you. What's that about? Does Mr. Geldman know?”

“He says Changers come to Arkham pretty regularly. Some do business at the pharmacy. Mr. Haddock hasn't come to see him for a while, but he has in the past. Geldman says he's sure the guy doesn't mean any harm. He supposes Mr. Haddock could have spotted me by chance, and now he's curious about me, a hybrid who's not from Innsmouth.”

Daniel had been reaching for Eddy's hand, little stretches toward it, little jerks back. When she finished the reach for him and clasped his hand firmly, webbing and all, his tension-hitched shoulders relaxed.

Sean gave them a minute before he couldn't stand it anymore and had to ask, “But how did Mr. Haddock even know you're a bro? Since you don't look or smell like him.”

“I don't know,” Daniel said. “Maybe the way any magician can pick up on another one. The energy signature thing.”

It could be, but Daniel didn't sound convinced or convincing. Probably he was just worn out, exhausted by the adrenaline rush and exertion of the rescue, the anxiety of revealing his big secret. Sean felt ready for a three-day nap himself, not for processing any more information, even if Daniel wanted to give it. The questions swarming in his head would have to wait. Eddy and Daniel continued holding hands. (Did Daniel's webbing feel all rubbery?) They were getting cool with each other again, and they were both cool with Sean, and they were all cool together. He leaned back and closed his eyes. So, Daniel's father hadn't told him he was half Deep One. The Deep One half had to come from his mother. Who'd died from leukemia. Or had it been from something else, some Deep One blood disease the human doctors hadn't known how to treat?…

Another soft knock on the parlor door heralded Geldman's return. He gave Eddy and Daniel plenty of time to drop hands before walking in with a steaming mug for his patient and Helen right behind him, come to herd all her pain-in-the-ass lambs home.

 

16

Daniel
rode back to the Arkwright House with Helen. Sean and Eddy rode back in the Civic, picking up pizzas for dinner on the way. They had to eat their share alone; when they arrived, Helen and Daniel were already locked in her office. An hour later, the door remained shut. Sean paused outside long enough to hear Daniel's voice, raised, angry, but Eddy hissed at him from the stairs, and he had to abort the eavesdropping mission.

Another half hour passed before Daniel pounded up to the common room to join them. He veered toward the couch, as if to sit next to Eddy, then went instead to a chair at the game table, where his elbow knocked the tiles on a half-played Scrabble board into gibberish. Through clenched teeth, he said, “So you called me a hero.”

His glare arrowed past Eddy to Sean. Not that it wasn't true, but when had he called Daniel that? Oh, at the beach, after the rescue. “Ah, yeah?”

“My father just called me everything but a hero. Helen phoned him. I'm not blaming her, that's her job, and I'll bet she's sorry, the way he hit the ceiling. How could the Order let me near the ocean? Like I'm a kid they could pen in behind a toddler gate. Then he started on how
I
should've known better, wasn't I listening to Geldman?”

“Man, I'm sorry.”

“So I told you guys I got to Arkham the same day you did? I came to the Arkwright House the same day, but I was living in this apartment near the pharmacy for three months before that, getting my treatments. My father wants me to go back there. I told him no way, not when my friends are at the House, first friends I've made since the Change started. Of course, then he had to know all about you and Eddy. Especially about Eddy, the minute I let out she's a girl.” Daniel abruptly shut up.

“It's okay,” Eddy said.

“It's not okay. He made me admit we were going out.”

“So?”

So Daniel got fascinated with the messed-up Scrabble game. He started arranging tiles on a rack. “He said I was crazy. He said you'd be crazy, too, if now that you knew what I am, you didn't blow me off completely.”

It wasn't magic that set Sean's skin prickling but his own shock and Eddy's vehement headshake. “Daniel,” she said. “He didn't tell you that.”

“He did, all right. He can't believe I'd—” A tile fell from Daniel's fingers. He racked it, looked at whatever word he'd made, then pushed the rack over. “He can't believe I'd act like my mother did, tricking a normal person into being with me. He said, maybe it's in the Deep One genes.”

The prickles in Sean's nape turned to stabbing needles. After a few seconds, Eddy walked to the game table like there were eggs underfoot. Sitting opposite Daniel, chin up, eyes too bright, she didn't touch him as she had at Geldman's. “It sucks that your father said that.”

“You think?”

“I know. But what did he mean, your mother tricked him?”

Daniel chewed at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It must have hurt, because he winced and rubbed that hand on his thigh, on Geldman's gray slacks. “You want to hear the long story, after everything you've already heard today?”

“Whatever you want to tell me. Us. The truth.”

“Maybe you want some pizza first?” Sean suggested. “We already had ours.”

“No. My stomach feels like it's upside down. Maybe a Coke.”

Sean brought him a bottle from the kitchenette refrigerator, then returned to his recliner, figuring it was enough for Eddy to be at the table, Daniel didn't need to be crowded.

Daniel drank half the bottle. Then he said, “When the Change started for me? My father paid for specialists, and second opinions, and third opinions. The docs finally agreed I had some kind of rare genetic anomaly. They sent me to a medical geneticist who got excited when he found case histories like mine. My father stopped taking me to him once he found out all the case history patients had ended up in asylums, no cure. Then he took me to plastic surgeons instead, and they cut away the digital webbing. And to dental surgeons, for implants.”

“Something happened to your teeth?” Eddy said.

Daniel pulled a tight grin, flaunting his perfect grille. “These are fakes. Implants. My own teeth fell out when new ones grew in behind them. Shark teeth. The dentists pulled those out and plugged these in. Well, not these exact ones. I've had the implants redone twice, because you know about sharks, how they have spare teeth lined up in their jaws? So do I now. They shove the implants out of the way, or grow around and stick out over them.”

Sean swallowed. “That's got to hurt.”

Daniel shrugged. Now that he'd gotten started, he plunged on: “The worst part is how my father always knew exactly what the Change was. He'd seen it before, when it started for my mom, and in the end she told him the truth. Okay, so he couldn't tell the doctors. But he didn't tell me either, not until my gills emerged. He couldn't get any doc to remove those or even cover them up—they said the connections between the gills and my lungs were too complicated. It didn't matter. They couldn't ‘cure' anything for long. The webbing grew back. The teeth grew back. My ears were shrinking. Even my bones were changing, like, my fingers and my toes getting longer.”

“You had to be scared,” Eddy said quietly.

“I was, but it was funny how I remembered my mom before she went away to the hospital. She'd started wearing a scarf around her neck, gloves all the time, even this mouth guard. Obviously, right, I had the same thing she'd had? I thought I'd die from it, too, but at least it was a connection to her.”

Sean's speculation at Geldman's had been correct: Daniel's mother hadn't died from leukemia. It sounded like she'd died simply from Changing. Bad, but he could understand the connection thing. “After my mom died?” he said. “I thought every stomachache I got was cancer, same as hers.”

Daniel gazed at him for a long time. Then he looked back down at the Scrabble chaos. “I know. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. But.” Sean paused for another swallow. “So after your gills showed, that's when your father told you about the Deep Ones?”

“What little he knew. Eventually he admitted my mom hadn't gone to a regular hospital. It was a sanitarium. She was going to stay there where no one could see what was happening to her, especially not me. And my father was going to find the cure for her. Only my mom got tired of waiting. She gave up. She hanged herself.”

Eddy pressed a hand to her mouth, muffling her “No.”

Sean kept swallowing, and it kept getting harder.

Daniel slogged on, monotonous: “She killed herself. My father said he wasn't letting me get to that point, it didn't matter how crazy the solution was. And a crazy solution came up pretty soon afterwards. The medical geneticist had kept digging on his own. He ran into stories about the Deep Ones. Legends. What most doctors would toss as paranormal bullshit. He followed up on the legends until he found the Order, and the Order sent him to Geldman. Dr. Bremerton—that's the geneticist—he's a member of the Order himself now. He contacted my father about Geldman's offer to treat me magically, and my father agreed, and I came here.”