Harrison Squared

 

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

All chapter epigraphs are from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

 

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

PROLOGUE

What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth.

I know that those memories aren't real. I was only three when my father died, too young to understand what was happening. So later I filled in the gaps with snippets from monster movies and nature documentaries, with half-forgotten visits to dim aquariums, with illustrations from my mother's grad-school textbooks.

This is how the brain works. It makes up stories out of whatever odds and ends it finds. Sometimes they're scary stories.

But there are gaps I can't fill. Like, the sound of my father's voice. I can't remember what he sounded like, even though I can picture him calling to me. In my memory I simply
know
that he's yelling my name. He's lifting me up out of the water, and there's something trying to pull me back down. It's black as oil and I can feel its teeth digging into my leg. In my memory I'm screaming, but I don't hear that either.

We're in the ocean, and it's night, and the waves are lifting us and throwing us down. Somewhere nearby, a boat is upside down, showing its white belly. We're getting farther and farther from it. (How would a toddler know this? Well, he wouldn't. These are “facts” I've layered on over time, like newspaper on a papier-mâché piñata.)

Some images, however, are so clear to me that they feel more true than my memory of yesterday's breakfast. I can see my father's face as he picks me up by my life vest. I can feel the wind as he tosses me up and over the next wave, toward that capsized boat. And I can see, as clearly as I can see my own arm, a huge limb that's risen up out of the water.

The arm is fat, and gray, the underside covered in pale suckers. It whips across my father's chest, grasping him—and then it pulls him away from me. The tentacle is attached to a huge body, a shape under the water that's bigger than anything I've ever seen.

And then nothing. My memories end there, with that frozen moment.

I know there's no such thing as monsters. Yes, we were out on the ocean, and the boat did flip over. But no creature bit through my leg to the bone—it was a piece of metal from the ship that sliced into me. My mother swam me to shore, and kept me from bleeding to death. My father drowned like an ordinary man.

Don't feel bad for me. I barely remember him. I certainly don't remember the infection that nearly killed me, and the series of surgeries, and the months I was in the hospital. Those memories are gone with the sound of my father's voice.

But I do know this: My parents saved me. My brain can make up all the scary stories it wants to, but I know that much is true.

1

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

The building seemed to be watching me.

I stood on the sidewalk, gazing up at it. It looked like a single gigantic block of dark stone, its surface wet and streaked with veins of white salt, as if it had just risen whole from the ocean depths. The huge front doors were recessed into the stone like a wailing mouth. Above, arched windows glared down.

The sign out front declared it to be T
HE
D
UNNSMOUTH
S
ECONDARY
S
CHOOL
.

This was like no school I'd ever seen before. I didn't know what it was—a mausoleum, maybe? Something they should have torn down. Yet some lunatic had looked at this hulk and said, I know, let's put
kids
in here!

Except the kids were nowhere to be seen. Nobody was outside, and the windows were dark. I'd suspected that I'd made a mistake coming with my mom to this town, but I now realized that I was wrong: I'd made a
horrible
mistake.

The truck door slammed behind me. Mom hustled around the back of the vehicle. In the bed of the truck were “the buoys in the band”: four research buoys labeled
E
,
H
,
S
, and
P
, otherwise known as Edgar, Howard, Steve, and Pete. The devices, which looked like red-and-white flying saucers with three-foot-high towers attached, were the reason we'd driven across the country.

“Hmm,” Mom said, looking up at the building. “It is kind of … tomb-y.” She touched the back of my neck. From inside the building came the sound of distant murmuring, or perhaps a chant. Maybe they were saying the pledge of allegiance. Or the pledge of something.

“It's not too late, H2.” That was her nickname for me: Harrison Harrison = Harrison Squared = H2. It was the kind of humor that scientists found hilarious. “I can call your grandfather tonight. We can put you on a plane—”

“It's fine,” I said, lying through my teeth. “
I'm
fine.” It had been my decision to come to Massachusetts with her on this research trip. I'd
insisted
. She wasn't going to dump me in Oregon with my grandfather. It was only going to be a month, two months tops, before I got back to my regularly scheduled life. Besides, I couldn't see Mom doing this research trip alone. She'd probably get so obsessed she'd forget to feed herself.

So we'd crossed the continent, four days from ocean to ocean, pushing the pickup as fast as it could go, and rattled into town so late last night that not a streetlight was burning. We'd lost all bars on our phones, and the GPS apps had stopped working, so it was almost by accident that we found the clapboard house Mom had rented, sight unseen, over the phone.

It had looked dismal in the dark, and morning hadn't improved it—or the town. We'd awoken (late!) to find ourselves surrounded by mist, fog, and cold. The Heart of Bleakness. I don't think Mom had noticed; she'd been focused on readying the buoys for deployment. Each tower supported a signal light, a satellite dish the size of a medium pizza, and a solar panel; and each of these components had to be wired to the batteries in the base. That had taken us longer than we'd thought it would. Then we'd loaded them into the truck and driven back up Main Street to the school.

Mom glanced at her watch. She'd chartered a boat to take her out, and she was supposed to have met the captain at the pier fifteen minutes ago.

“It's okay,” I said. I slung my backpack onto my shoulder. “I'll check myself in. You've got a boat to catch.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “I'm still your mother.”

Together we pushed on the big wooden doors, and they swung open on squealing hinges. The large room beyond was a kind of atrium, the high ceiling supported with buttresses like the ribs of a huge animal. Light glowed from globes of yellow glass that hung down out of the dark on thick cables. The stone floor was so dark it seemed to absorb the light.

Corridors ran off in three directions. Mom marched straight ahead. There were no sounds except for the slap of our feet against the stone. Even the chanting had stopped. It was suddenly the quietest school I'd ever been in. And the coldest. The air seemed wetter and more frigid inside than out.

I noticed something on the floor, and stopped. It was a faded, scuffed logo of a thin shark with a tail as long as its body, flexing as if it were leaping out of the water. Below it were the words G
O
T
HRESHERS
.

My first picture books had been of sharks, whales, and squids. Mom's bedtime stories were all about the hunting habits of sea predators. Threshers were large sharks who could stun prey with their tails. As far as I knew, no one in the history of the world had ever used one as a school mascot.

Mom stopped at a door and waved for me to catch up. Stenciled on the frosted glass was O
FFICE OF THE
P
RINCIPAL
. From inside came a slapping noise, a
whap! whap!
that sounded at irregular intervals.

We went inside. The office was dimly lit, with yellow paint that tried and failed to cheer up the stone walls. Two large bulletin boards were crammed with tattered notices and bits of paper that looked like they hadn't been changed in years. At one end of the room was a large desk, and behind that sat a woman wearing a pile of platinum hair.

No, not sitting—standing. She was not only short, but nearly spherical. Her fat arms, almost as thick as they were long, thrashed in the air. She held a fly swatter in each hand and seemed to be doing battle with a swarm of invisible insects. Her gold hoop earrings swung in counterpoint.