She Walks in Shadows (28 page)

Then there is only darkness.

Anna wakes up in the hospital hooked up to what feels like dozens of monitors and IV lines. The nurses are kind and speak good English, but Anna struggles with putting together the simplest sentence. Her lungs are on fire, her skin dry and brittle, her lips chapped.

“Water,” she rasps. Then, “Bianca?”

The nurses bring her water.

Later, Anna hears that campus security reached the lab a few minutes after the explosion. The nitrogen-bottle projectile had gone through the room and through the opposite wall. No one mentions the horror it slammed through on its way there. No one speaks of a vortex. Maybe no one saw it, save Anna and Bianca.

Bianca was not saved. The broken-off nozzle hit her squarely in the stomach. The guards did what they could, but she succumbed to her internal injuries in the hospital.

Anna had swallowed and breathed in a quantity of salt water. The security officers had found her unconscious and throwing up in a puddle, and saved her life by preventing her from choking on her own vomit. The hospital has tried to keep her hydrated to fight off the salt poisoning and she prevails.

Professor Jacobsen and Max visit her in the hospital. Max looks the same as always, but Professor Jacobsen has black tights under her skirt and no jewellery. They have a gift from the lab members: The laboratory has pooled their money to pay for a new cell phone for her. Anna feels uncomfortable taking it. It is far too expensive, from people she knows far too little. The phone is dripping with guilt. From police questions and now Professor Jacobsen’s explanations, she learns that everyone believes Bianca had a mental breakdown, destroyed the laboratory, and tried to drown Anna in a bucket of salt-water. Buckets and buckets of salt-water. There was also a pipeline break. Anna cannot understand how the story makes sense to anyone. Perhaps it doesn’t.

Professor Jacobsen is clearly distraught. “Maybe I pushed her too hard,” she says. Anna rasps in response that it was not anyone’s fault. There is nothing else she can say. How can you grant absolution when you don’t think you deserve it yourself?

Max the SAXS guy looks old and sad. “Poor Bianca,” he says. “Poor you. Take care of yourself.” He tells Anna that all of the
cthulhu
experiments were ruined by the flood in the laboratory. Little ghost-like patches of the cultures were found here and there, rapidly dying due to drying. Now the lab reeks of chlorine and cleaning agents, and will be rebuilt later. Anna wonders what happened to the rest of the creature — maybe the rest of it went down the drain in little pieces. Her eyes dart towards the bathroom. The door is slightly open. She has difficulty concentrating on her visitors.

Professor Jacobsen reassures Anna that they still have a complete data set and a publication can still be written. Anna feels sick to her stomach. Professor Jacobsen goes on and on — she seems oblivious to Anna’s discomfort. Max tries to interrupt her several times politely. He finally puts a light hand on her forearm and scowls. “Stop. Just stop. Not the time, not the place.” Anna looks at the pair of them and wonders when the hammer scientist turned into the lesser tool.

After they leave, Anna forces her aching legs to take the few steps to the bathroom. She grabs a towel, closes the door, and puts the tightly rolled towel in front of the doorstep. It is not watertight by any means, and it will be difficult to explain to nurses, but it still feels better than nothing.

The thought of the little
cthulhus
being washed into the drain, into the water treatment plant, finally out into the sea, fills her with dread. She tries to tell herself
H. cthulhu
should not thrive in the dirty sewage water where salt concentration is rapidly dwindling, nor in the low salt of the Baltic Sea. Not even in the moderately salty Kattegatt, should they float in that direction.

Anna doesn’t know how she can go back home. How she can ever step into a laboratory again. She thinks all samples of funny, harmless
Halophile cthulhu
should be burned to ash.

It doesn’t thrive in sewage, she tells herself time and time again. Nor in brackish water, nor sea water.

Then she thinks of the vast Dead Sea.

NOTES FOUND IN A DECOMMISSIONED ASYLUM, DECEMBER 1961

Sharon Mock

THE MAN IN
the blue suit says this is a hospital, but I know better.

They give me a room to myself. It is large, but all it has is a bed. No headboard, no footboard, no table, no chair. Fluorescent tubes that switch on and off through no will of my own. One small window, glass and chicken wire, so high up all I can see is the sky. If I need to use the bathroom, I will have to pound on the door and hope the guard notices.

This is all for my protection, the man in the blue suit assures me. I have experienced a trauma. I must be held for observation. So many large words, as though syllables will hide the truth.

They brought me here in the back of a delivery van. Across from me slept the man who had tried to kill me. Until he woke up. Until he opened his eyes and opened his mouth and cursed my name and blasphemed my blasphemous salvation.

They told me I was safe. They pointed out that his arms and body were firmly restrained, bound to the van’s steel walls.

Problem was, so were mine.

The walls, thick gray stone, swallow sound. But when I shut my eyes, I hear everything. There is a woman who laughs immoderately and demands cigarettes from the orderlies. There are men whose minds race, men whose thoughts are a plate of scrambled eggs spilled on the floor. There is a boy who throws blocks and dreams of fire.

Below all this, I hear Bill’s voice. Muffled and slurred, as though from very far away. He calls out in his drugged and frenzied slumber, repeating those same foolish words he cried out as he tried to kill me.

He calls out to you,
I think in an unguarded moment.
Will you go to him?

I tell myself the laughter in my head is my own. Isn’t it true now, either way?

There is a procession in my head, where dreams used to go. A mummer’s dance, full of black gloss and fairy lights and lurid color. When I try to see more clearly, it evaporates, twists into the faces of angry men.

I am too young, too new to this. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Forgive me.

Near dawn, Bill’s voice roars loud in my head, then suddenly stops. I jam my fist in my mouth to keep from crying, in case anybody is watching. I know what has happened. The drugs have worn off and Bill has taken his life.

I don’t want to know how, but I’m sure the man in the blue suit will tell me.

You
is such a useful word. It can apply to anything. Male, female, singular, plural: any, all, or none of these. It implies nothing, save the familiarity of direct address.

It would be nice if there were a third-person pronoun like that. So useful. Maybe there’s something in another language that will serve. I resolve to research the matter more fully when I get free from this place.

“He tore out his carotid with his own fingernails,” the man in the blue suit says. “His throat. The veins in his throat. Do you understand?”

He has a name, not just a suit. He gave it to me the night before, when the rescuers brought us in. I refuse to remember it.

“I didn’t need to know that.” I’d just reminded him that Bill was not just my fellow student, not just my companion. He was my fiancé.

“You don’t seem that upset.”

How am I supposed to respond to that? I make the mistake of closing my eyes to collect my thoughts and my head fills with everybody’s thoughts but my own.

I open my eyes and tell the truth. “It’s all ... overwhelming,” I say. “And I’d rather not cry on your shoulder right now.”

The man scribbles nonsense on a yellow notepad. “Very self-collected.” He sounds proud of himself. “Why don’t you tell me again what happened the night of the 14th?”

I tell him the same thing I did the previous afternoon. The same thing, more or less, I told the responders, though I was not much for talking at the time.

We drove up from Boston that morning on short notice to investigate an archeological site that Bill’s advisor had learned about from sources he didn’t discuss. Because of the short notice the team was just Bill and myself, borrowed from the sociology department. I sat in the back and got carsick while Bill and Dr. Davis discussed matters in voices pitched too low for me to hear over the rumbling engine.

We arrived on the island in the afternoon, made camp in a farmer’s field at the edge of some woods. I wondered why we didn’t stay at the motor lodge down the road, but didn’t ask. I didn’t want to cause a fuss. While Bill and I set up the tents, Dr. Davis went to scout out the site.

It was starting to get dark and the Professor still wasn’t back, so we went looking for him —

“Both of you? And your colleague agreed to this?” the man in the suit asks, as though he’s caught me in something. All I say is Yes. In fact, we’d argued about it, but he doesn’t need to know that.

We found a hole in the woods. A tunnel, sloping, down under the base of the slate cliffs. Bill went first. He wouldn’t let me come along. I watched him for a long time, until I couldn’t see him in the darkness, only the light of his lantern.