The Nightmare Garden

“Better than the last few days,” I agreed.

He kicked a pebble ahead of us down the road. “You ever been to Innsmouth?”

“No,” I said. “Conrad and I didn’t exactly get seaside vacations.”

“Nice little town,” said Dean. “Quaint, I guess you’d call it. I ran a few fugitives up there to catch the boat for Canada.”

Sometimes it was easy to forget Dean’s life before we met. He had been a guide to fugitives and those wanted by the Proctors; he’d lived every day of his life with danger. Because of that, I tried to stay in the good mood he was seeing. I didn’t want him worrying.

“Tell me more about the places you’ve been.”

“Favorite place ever was San Francisco, hands down,” Dean said. “They have the walls, not like Lovecraft, and inside it’s like a million cities compressed into one, piled on top of each other, like layers you could dive down through. They have a Chinatown there, and men who can breathe fire if they drink a potion, and women who can swallow knives. It smells like steam and smoke and gunpowder, and since it’s a modern city the Proctors don’t pay any attention to the poor folks and we have the run of the place without much risk of getting burned.”

All I really knew about San Francisco was that it was home to one of the three great Engines in the States— now two, I supposed—and that off the coast was Alcatraz Island, where the worst heretics were confined to a hospital run by the Bureau of Proctors, like Ravenhouse in Lovecraft, only a hundred times worse.

“At night you can see weird blue lights out on Alcatraz,” Dean said, as if reading my thoughts. “Everyone says the Proctors have got secret experiments going on out there.” He looked at me. “Knowing what I know now, I gotta wonder.”

I’d wondered too: if there was no necrovirus, what had the necrodemons everyone had so feared during the war really been?

“Maybe someday we’ll know,” I said to Dean.

“Maybe,” he said, “but I doubt it. I don’t think the whole truth’s ever really going to get out.”

Before I could give that too much thought and just depress myself all over again, we came over a hill and saw the sea, with a cluster of gray and blue buildings huddled at the water’s edge.

“Innsmouth,” Dean said. “Doesn’t look like much, I know.”

“No,” Cal agreed. Bethina wrinkled her nose.

“Smells like fish.”

“We need a plan,” I said. “Dean and I will go ahead and try to find the captain of the submersible, and you two wait here for him. If something happens, you need to get word back to my father. All right?”

Cal instantly shook his head. I knew he wouldn’t like staying behind again, but Cal was the only one I trusted to be wily enough to get back to the Crosley house if we ran into trouble in the village. Plus, he could protect Bethina, which was more than I could do at the moment. I was so jittery and nervous I could feel myself vibrating, even standing still on the hilltop.

“Please,” I said to Cal softly. “I promise we’ll either send word or we’ll be back in a few hours and this will all be a wash.” The last part was a lie. I had to go north.

Bethina took Cal’s hand. “I think Miss Aoife is right,” she said. “If there’s trouble, they’ll need someone to light out and send help.”

“There won’t be,” Dean assured them, but I saw worry lines in his forehead that usually weren’t there. I wondered if he knew something about Innsmouth that I didn’t.

“As long as there’s someone down here who can get me out of this place,” I said aloud.

“I’ll introduce you around,” Dean said. “If the boat I’m thinking of hasn’t been sunk yet, they can get us to the Great Old Ones themselves. Crackerjack crew, every one.” He shoved a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture that I’d come to recognize as Dean getting ready for trouble. “But antsy,” he said. “So move slow and stay quiet in the village, and don’t say anything stupid to anyone.”

I squeezed his hand to reassure him I could handle it. “I trust you, Dean.”

We walked in silence until we came to the village outskirts.

Even as early as it was, I’d expected some movement, but there was nothing. No jitneys, no steam carriages. Not even the horse-drawn variety was in evidence, though far away I heard some sort of livestock bray and then quiet. The place felt as if it were holding its breath—not abandoned, but staying perfectly still, waiting for something.

The curtains on the rows of pitch-roofed cottages were drawn, down to the last one; passing the houses was like passing a line of faces with blind eyes staring into nothing. I shivered, not entirely from the brisk sea air.

I got close enough to Dean so I could whisper. “Is it supposed to be this quiet?”

“No,” Dean said in the same tone, his hand going into his pocket for his knife. “Something’s wrong.”

I reached deep for a little of my Weird, but nothing unusual prickled, just the usual sorts of machines and locks and clockworks that a village at the edge of the ocean would possess.

There was a small town square, like a hub in a wheel, and a fountain in the center of it frozen solid, plumes of ice erupting from the mouths of a trio of metal leviathans.

A scream came, then cut off as abruptly as a needle skipping off a record. I started down the narrow side street it had come from, placing my feet carefully and silently on the bricks.

Dean caught up with me. “I’d say we should get to the docks, but I don’t know that I want to be that exposed right at the moment,” he whispered.

I nodded silently and reached back for his hand. Dean squeezed it and then let it drop, and we crept ahead in matched steps, until we’d gone away from the sea and the center of town and come upon a farmhouse set a little back from the street. A sagging red barn beyond held the source of the scream.

Something else, softer and more terrifying, drifted on the wind. Sobbing. Human sobbing, coming from a human throat.

“Aoife …,” Dean started, but I shushed him and continued toward the barn, keeping myself out of view of the barn door.

Through a slat in the side, I saw three people in nightclothes on their knees on the dirt floor of the barn, two Proctors in black uniforms brandishing shock rifles at them. The girl, the one sobbing, had a split lip, and blood dribbled down her white nightgown. One of the Proctors drew back his hand again.

“We’ve been flying up and down the coast looking in every rathole they could duck into,” he snapped. “We know everyone in this filthy town harbors fugitives. Now tell me where they are—at least two, boy and girl, dark haired. One calling herself Aoife Grayson.”

“We don’t know,” the girl sobbed. “If that terrorist were here, we’d turn her in real quick. Please. We don’t know.”

I almost shrieked when Dean clapped a hand on my shoulder. I’d been transfixed by the scene in the barn, and enraged. “Aoife,” Dean whispered.

“I’m not leaving,” I hissed at him. “We have to do something.”

“Not that,” Dean insisted, his mouth practically pressed against my ear. “Look. Past the barn.”

There was a long field that sloped down to cliffs above the water, probably half a mile away. And there, moored at the edge of the cliff, was a familiar black hulk of an airship with the spiky Proctor insignia painted on the side.

Draven’s. I’d been so preoccupied with the people in the barn I hadn’t even looked beyond. It wasn’t just regular Proctors in there, but Draven’s elite troops. How had he known I’d be coming to Innsmouth?

“What do we do?” Dean muttered. His voice was still as soft as a flick of silk, but his grip on my shoulder betrayed panic as he squeezed hard enough to bruise.

“I don’t know,” I said in the same voice. Inside the barn, the girl screamed again.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, sir! Please stop hitting me!”

“Just … something,” I said to Dean, and wrenched free of his grasp.

In Cal’s stories, heroines usually carried bullwhips or daggers, flew their own airships, swung in on ropes. They always had a daring plan. Or even a stupid plan. Never no plan.

Inside the barn door, I grabbed up a disused axe handle and swung it at the nearest Proctor, catching him across the back of the skull. He went down with a grunt, and the other swung his rifle toward me.

Dean grabbed him from behind and threw him into the nearest wall. The Proctor rebounded off it with a clatter but held on to his shock rifle and got off a wild shot. The sizzling electric bolt clipped the older woman in the