“You up from Arkham, then?” the man in overalls asks, his words mumbled around the stem of a corncob pipe. Between the pipe and his accent, she’s having trouble understanding him. “They got lady professors down there now, do they?”
“One or two,” she replies, stepping nearer to the table. “It was dead when they found it?” she asks, and the constable nods and exchanges a glance with the man in overalls.
“Ayuh,” says the constable. “And if it hadn’t been, we’d have shot it.”
“You got a husband?” the man in overalls asks, and Immacolata ignores him. But she can’t help but be amused that they’re both so concerned with her sex that they’ve hardly seemed to give a second thought to her paleness or her smoked-lens spectacles. She sets her satchel down on an edge of the table and opens it, selecting from the array of items inside a pair of rubber gloves, forceps, and a stoppered bottle of sodium phenoxide. She pulls on the gloves.
“What are you a professor of?” the man in overalls wants to know.
“A doctor of anatomy,” the constable answers for her.
“That so?” the man in overalls asks.
“That’s very much so,” Immacolata says, speaking hardly above a whisper. It’s a good-enough lie. It’ll suffice until she’s done here.
The thing on the table is a biologist’s nightmare, clearly belonging to no known phylum of animals. The exoskeleton and jointed limbs suggest an arthropod, while the dorsal pair of membranous appendages might almost pass for stubby wings. The anterior limbs end in claws, like those of a crab, lobster, or crayfish. At the end of what she assumes is its neck, there is a bizarre ellipsoid organ, which she takes to be the head, sprouting fleshy tendrils that remind her of the tentacles of an anemone or sea cucumber. End to end, the creature measures just over 1.5 meters.
“You know what it is?” asks the constable.
“I don’t,” she says, and then uses the forceps to retract a leathery flap of skin located between two of the rows of tendrils.
“Would you venture a guess?”
“I’d prefer not to,” she tells him.
Beneath the flap is a sticky yellow mass, and she takes a sample, depositing it in an empty specimen bottle. Under the microscope, it’ll reveal structures reminiscent of the tellospores of certain Pucciniomycetes fungi, named rusts and smuts, but the resemblance will only be of the most general sort.
“You gonna buy it?” asks the man in overalls. He takes his pipe from his mouth, and she realizes he’s missing most of his front teeth.
“I wasn’t planning to,” she replies, returning the specimen bottle to her satchel. “With the roads out and the trains not running, there’s really no way I could get it back to Massachusetts, anyway.”
The man frowns, clearly disappointed, and then he returns the pipe to its place between his gums. “Ayuh,” he says. “Don’t suppose you could.”
“After I leave, I recommend you burn it.”
“Why should we do that?” asks the constable.
“Just to be safe. Better safe than sorry, right?”
She snips one of the tendrils and places it in another bottle, then proceeds to pour a few drops of the sodium phenoxide on the thing’s skin. There’s no reaction whatsoever, but she hadn’t expected there would be.
“Old folks round here tell stories,” says the constable, “yarns about demons way up in the hills, off towards Turkey Mountain.” He pauses and points north.
“Stories?” says Immacolata without looking at him.
“Yes, ma’am. Things that were here a thousand years before the Indians. My grandmother, she told us those stories when I was a child. She said they could fly, and that they’d crawled outta Hell to haunt the gorges and hollers. She said, back when she was just a girl, some prospectors from Montpelier went up into those hills and were never seen again. Said sometimes the demons flew down into the towns, and that she’d seen their footprints in the snow. But she was a superstitious woman—a bit touched, if truth be told—and we never paid her tales much heed.”
“Sounds as if she had quite the healthy imagination,” Immacolata tells him. Of course, she’s heard the stories, too, and she’s read Eli Davenport’s 1839 monograph collecting various oral traditions from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, folklore that describes creatures very similar to the drowned, broken thing laid out before her. She returns everything to her bag, snaps it shut, and pulls off the rubber gloves, depositing them on the table beside the body.
“After I leave, do promise me that you’ll burn it, please. Right away.”
The constable scratches his chin. “What’s the rush?”
“I’ve noticed a few stray dogs about town,” she says, “and if they were to eat it, the flesh might prove poisonous. There even could be disease. Were I you, I shouldn’t take any chances.”
“You sure you ain’t wantin’ to buy it?” asks the man in overalls.
“I’m sure,” she says.
Suddenly, the plane bucks and shudders around her, and Immacolata is jolted rudely back to Now. There are no highways in the sky, as a Jimmy Stewart film once warned, only these unpredictable, invisible causeways of air to hold you up or drop you, their whims as capricious as any god’s. A cold front from Greenland collides with a wall of warmer, wetter weather, and here she is caught in between. Fasten your seat belts, please remain seated, and the pilot assures her they’ll be out of this shortly. She checks her iPhone for messages, but there’s nothing. Maybe the storm brewing out there is blocking the signal. So she turns her attention back to the window. Fourteen thousand feet below the jet, a roiling stratocumulus canyon land of thunderheads has hidden the sea from view.
Time is the navigator, and we are only hitchhikers.
The Third Law.
She slips, and the plane fades like mist coming apart at the end of morning.
For a handful of seconds, she’s back in that booth in Winslow, smoking and listening as the Signalman talks about Drew Standish and his followers.
“It’s all right there on the suicide drive,” he says.
Then she blinks, and now Immacolata walks the streets of a city that once was Los Angeles. To those who never left, now it is merely the City, shattered by the great earthquake of 2032, flooded, burned, and finally consumed by the invaders who came first as a terrible wasting disease carried by windborne alien spores. It’s not as if there weren’t warnings. She stops outside a crumbling building, gutted by decay and half buried beneath the glistening, ropy fungi that grows almost everywhere. She knows this place; she’s been here several times before.
The sun never shines on the City.
The black ships have seen to that.
Two weeks ago, the Pan-Asian Alliance dropped nuclear warheads all across southern India, from Thiruvananthapuram to Bangalore, in a desperate, last ditch to halt the northward progression of the invaders. Three days from now, the titular head of what remains of the United States will be assassinated by militants from the Earth–Yuggoth Cooperative. Afterwards, the EYC will burn what little is left of Washington D.C.
There are signposts in the future, just as there are signposts in the past.