Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

  Only once had Rose gone to the pier in order to watch her father work. The sight of those creatures scurrying sideways, or groping their surroundings with antennae, or flogging the gutting table with their ropey tentacles, was too much. She not only shunned the docks where the moored fishing boats bobbed like tethered coffins awaiting burial at sea, Rose also refused to ever swim at Innsmouth Beach.

  There was a world out there below those waves of bottle-green, of midnight-blue. What were its laws, Rose wondered? How did those alien things make sense of their world? Did they have customs, a faith?

  Sailing out to snatch away these creatures from their habitat seemed not only wrong but dangerous.

  And so it was. For now the sea had taken her father. He had been deemed lost at sea, but Rose’s fertile imagination had been assailing her with images of her father being hooked and dragged downward; fished away from the world of men.

  II. Auld Wytcherie

  Whenever the mist rolled in off the water it would smudge the boundary between sea and land. On such days Rose liked to play a little game where she would close her eyes and creep deeper into the fog, trying to guess at where the waves began. Never once had she guessed accurately. The tide was always playful, ebbing farther than she’d anticipated, or pressing too near too soon.

  If the mist could blur these things, why not others?

  It was a child’s reasoning, to be sure. But it was enough to inspire Rose to escape from the wake in her aunt’s cottage and make her way to Elmira, the grey witch of Innsmouth.

  Everyone in Innsmouth knew of Elmira, and though many scoffed at the bulk of the lore that circulated around her, caregivers were uncertain enough to warn their charges to steer clear of her shack on the bluffs.

  Rose was confident that if even one tenth of the things she’d heard about Elmira’s powers were true, her father could well be brought back.

  She went to the shack and she knocked. Elmira answered, but refused to hear the girl’s story until a tariff was paid. Rose gave what little money she had in her pocket; two silver coins of the lowest denomination. They sufficed.

  Elmira listened as the child expressed her desire.

  From a battered sea trunk Elmira produced a bundle of netted rope, and from this, a conch shell.

  “On the new moon, face the sea and blow into this horn. It will rouse your father from the deeps.”

  Unaware of what a new moon was, Rose asked for clarification and received a cursory explanation complete with appointed time.

  Elmira then looked hard into the child’s fresh face. She gave her the requisite warning that came with this form of incantation. Rose nodded, but the old witch was cunning enough to see that the child neither understood nor cared about any negative consequences.

  One week later the time came ‘round and Rose heeded it, sneaking away from her aunt’s cottage (her home just until Father returned) while her aunt snored upon the living room sofa bed.

  The beach was springtime vacant. Rose shivered as she crept along the lunar-dappled sandbanks. The chloral stench of high tide was especially strong tonight, or perhaps it was the nature of the girl’s task that made the night so unseemly.

  Rose had hoped for a fog-laden atmosphere tonight, so that the boundary between sea and land, between dead and quick, would not feel so harsh, so impassable. But the new moon’s glow was untrammelled by mist or cloud. Even the stars seemed nearer and clearer, glinting at the child’s work as if conscious, maybe even judgmental.

  A cluster of night-fishing boats moved in the far distance, their spotlights gleaming like lowlying embryonic moons. Rose knew they were too far from shore to see her as she freed the conch shell from its netting. Beside this she set a photograph of her and her father, along with a bottle of his favourite cologne and one of his caps.

  She righted herself, brought the shell to her mouth. The rim of its horn was spiky. It cut her unsteady lip. Rose closed her eyes and exhaled.

  What emitted from the twisted shell was a faint and strangled sound. It was neither musical nor shrill; simply a gust of squeaky air that came and went. Rose tried to blow a second call but this time her breath could not muster any noise at all. Disappointment scooped at her insides. She slumped down before her hurried and haphazard shrine.

  She thought back to the warning the old witch had given her: “When one is called back from the deep, they do not always return alone…”

  Rose gathered her items and sneaked back home. Though she was deflated, she still could not bring herself to glance back over her shoulder to see what (if anything) might have begun a shoreward journey.

  III. The Incanted

  The Deep has its cities, its customs, its denizens. To the eyes of the living the ocean near Innsmouth’s shore appeared as anything but uncommon, an expanse of lilting weeds, sea-life great and small, and human wreckage.

  Those who perceive with the eyes of the heart, however, witness an altogether more phantastical scene. For there, in the submerged city of Y’ha-nthlei, stood temples whose grandeur was scarcely conceivable, columned galleries where all the knowledge of this Deep race was preserved in a seemingly endless epic narrative that had been carved into the walls of drowned marble. Theirs was a wisdom too nuanced and unhuman to ever be grasped by the tender grey matter of humankind, and because of this, a great wedge was placed between their world and yours. To the landlubber, the Deep Ones were rare enough to become mere myth. Their gods, their labyrinthine city, their treasures, all became tall tales with which the sea-hardened regaled the fresh-faced youths. As with all yarns of the water, most were nothing more than products of the imagination of dullards. A keen ear can perceive the all too human yearnings embedded within such stories: the lust for great riches, for the touch of an exotic and impossibly beautiful feminine creature, for battles befitting The Eddas.

  Occasionally warnings would surface about the dangers of those who heeded the Siren song and mated with one of the denizens of Y’ha-nthlei. It’s been said that their progeny are misshapen hybrids, things that suggest two worlds but do not fully belong in either. It is this taint that gives the locals what has been dubbed “that Innsmouth look”. This taint also could explain how certain landlubbers, such as the witch Elmira, developed the powers that were deemed uncanny to those who lacked it.

  But the Sirens beckon still. And sailors are often only too willing to answer.

  How exquisitely rare it is for the call to come from shore!

  To hear that shrill and extended note sail from the land, dive down and down and down to romance the dwellers of the sunken city.

  This particular call was born of a heart that had been broken in a specific way. Each pain bends the call in a unique manner. The wail of a desolate lover differs from that of a mourning mother. This particular call was unmistakably child-like. Thus, what responded was a parental soul.

  This soul rose up. It clothed itself in the debris of the ocean floor; coral for its bones, its flesh; crustaceans and seaweed. Fine anemones formed a nervous system.

  This father rose, swam, climbed, and eventually shambled across the fog-smeared terra firma.

  IV. Wayfaring

  It took the father a day-and-a-half to reach shore. Thule Fog swirled about all of Innsmouth, obscuring the creature as he went wayfaring among the dunes that lay past the sea.

  In time he found the oblong cabin. Only nominally more auspicious than a shed, this clapboard structure was home to an old woman who introduced herself as Elmira. Her face, which resembled withered fruit, seemed forever in danger of sliding free from the skull on which it was mounted. Her fingers were unnaturally long and resembled the boughs of a willow tree; knotty with arthritis. Her voice was akin to the sound of water struggling down a clogged drain. Her breath smelled strongly of anise.

  The father had ventured to Elmira’s hovel because of its window light. Through those endless banks of pale mist, the guttering light through the grimy pane of the cabin’s only window seemed as bright and rare a
s a fallen star. The cabin door had suddenly flung open and the father had seen the spindle-thin woman, her arm scooping the air again and again in a desperate gesture of beckoning. Elmira was back-lit by several wan candles or lamps; a crude and crooked impression of some haloed saint.

  The incline was steep. His waterlogged feet worried across deep divots and stones made greasy by rain and moss. One of these rocks caught him mid-step, forcing him to practically stumble right into the old woman’s home. Immediately Elmira pressed the door closed behind him and guided the father to an upturned crate on the floor.

  “Rest now,” she urged in that brackish voice of hers. Elmira curled her willow fingers around the father’s arm. “Rest…”

  A proper respite was difficult to achieve hunched upon that bowed and splintery box. He did what he could to tame his shivering and tried to pretend that the few sputtering candles that sat about the room were actually warming. Those tin can lamps were crude to the point of ugliness, but the father was grateful for their light, for it had been so long since he’d seen light. He also enjoyed the curiously cosy fragrance they emitted, so much as his altered nostrils would allow.

  “That’s it, my child,” she said, “breathe it all in, let it nourish you.”

  The scent was reminiscent of cooking meat. The candles were in fact cans of congealed meat dripping, which the old woman had collected and fastened with slow burning wicks. There were greasy hisses of the warmed animal fat.

  Elmira settled into a rocking chair with a cracked runner. She began to rock, slowly, like a creaking pendulum.

  “You know why you’re here?” she asked the father.

  She pointed to the wall. He noticed the water stains and the rivulets of rain that were breaching the cabin with ease. “In that lighthouse out there, right on the point, that’s where it’s gonna happen, where she’ll come to you.”

  V. Lighthouse

  The old woman had taken her leave. The tin can lanterns had been snuffed by the pooled fat, and the rain seemed to have ceased. The father gazed out the window, using what were only nominally eyes to study the brackish glimmer that radiated through the fog. He rose and shuffled to the door.

  The mist was still settled over the heath. For all the father knew it covered every inch of the world. Somewhere beyond this pulsating shroud the sun struggled to shine.

  He stood and allowed the noises of the terrain to be collected and amplified within his seashell ears. All he could hear was the susurrus of the distant surf calling him back to his deep home.

  The father knew nothing of this village, but Elmira had mentioned the lighthouse last night, with its beacon that swept the water with a wand of white light.

  The land was even more treacherous in the fog than it would have already been for the father’s naïve feet. He went wayfaring for hours, unsure which way to go. He did not spot a single living soul.

  Only after he heard the sound of a foghorn, that deep lamenting wail, did he begin to navigate. That low sonorous call gave a primordial voice to the mist.

  At length, he found the lighthouse.

  With great care he made his way to the end of the stout pier and searched for the door.

  It was hanging ajar. The damp gusts rolling in off the water wobbled the iron door back and forth, but were not strong enough to slam it shut. The father slipped through the opening and stood within the cone-shaped hull of the lighthouse, listening. A loaded, anticipatory silence held fast within the oblong chamber.

  His tedious ascent up the staircase of spiralling iron ended in a welcome increase of light. For although the fog was just as thick at this perch, the lighthouse chamber was panelled almost entirely in windows, allowing much of the stormy glow to illuminate the wooden console with its primitive gauges and switches, a table hosting a metal coffee urn and hot plate, and a cot. The lighthouse was abandoned. Here the foghorn was uncomfortably loud. Its two-tone signal made his chest ache.

  The father moved to the cot and noticed that the pillow was soaked with water. It was also brightened with an artefact, a curled thing like a stillborn seahorse. A shell, its inner folds the colour of warm living flesh.

  He raised it to where his mouth should be.

  VI. Roused

  A cry like the trilling of a thousand mad birds wrenched Rose off the wave of beige sleep she’d been savouring for what seemed to be years. Grief often swaddles its victims in a soothing oblivion, protecting them from assailing dreams. So when Rose roused to a darkened bedroom she was certain that the noise was not a product of her imagination.

  She slipped out of her bed and passed by her snoring aunt.

  Out the back door and across the dewy lawn, Rose moved like a rat of Hamelin, lured and lulled by a monotonous music only her charmed ears could perceive.

  She shuffled toward the waterfront, where none of the drunken revellers or the whores even noticed the barefooted form dressed in a nightgown that was almost phosphorescent within the unsavoury shadows of the wharf.

  The lighthouse soon met her gaze. It was enrobed in a strange fog, luminous and animated. As the damp wind teased out thin tendrils of smoke from the vertical fog bank, they curled like fingers in a gesture of beckoning. Rose heeded, hooked upon those curling clouds until she found herself standing at the tower’s open door.

  By now the high note had ceased and all was silent, save for the tides that plopped and clapped against the floodwall and the pillars of the docks.

  She entered and looked up the fog-brightened staircase. A mannish silhouette stared back at her. It raised the shell.

  Rose raced up the steps, crying out “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Breathless, she reached the summit and ran toward the figure that stood with open arms.

  Or things like arms.

  The first warning Rose received was olfactory; the chloral stench of decaying marine life, the cloying smell of brine.

  What stood before her was a patchwork thing, a doll of flotsam and squirming membranes of sea life. The eyes were pits that pulsed with grey oysters and the flesh was an armour of shellfish and other scuttling things. The mouth was an aspect of jellyfish that flexed like a yoni. Rose was horrified to hear that the creature was trying to speak.

  The father-thing scooped her up with ease and carried her limp form down the coiling steps. Somewhere deep in her consciousness, like the memory of a distant dream, images of an impossible city began to flower before her mind’s eye. It was as if whatever fell intelligence animated this abomination was attempting to reassure her, to tempt her with the glories of what laid in wait for her many leagues below.

  Rose wondered if this was in fact her father after all, transformed by the taint of Y’ha-nthlei. She hoped the city was as glorious as it seemed. And then she thought no more.

  VII. Requiem

  Rory O’Fey had scarcely been conscious for the better part of a week once the crew of the S.S. Imperium had fished him out of the waters. They’d spotted him at the last possible second. The surging bow of their great ship would have halved him had some of the men not rushed to the side of the vessel and frantically pushed the prostrate man aside with their oars.

  Exactly how long he’d been floating upon the slab of driftwood the men of the Imperium never did ascertain. The man had only the shorn clothes on his back and nothing in the way of identification.

  The medic estimated by Rory’s severe dehydration, his blistered and near-purple flesh, and general delirium that he’d been adrift for approximately a week. It took ten days of near-constant care to bring the rescued man back to a state of lucidity, at which time he told the captain and medic his story:

  He’d been night-fishing off the shore of Innsmouth when a freak gale assailed the tiny schooner he and his friend had been in. The boat had not only capsized but had cracked in two. Rory had managed to cling to one of the wooden shards, but his partner, he knew, was gone. He’d floated, he’d prayed that the good Lord send an angel to watch over his daughter Rose, and he’d waited for his i
nevitable demise.

  The Imperium was unable to re-route its course back to Innsmouth, so instead they messaged the nearest port and arranged for Rory O’Fey’s transport back to his New England fishing village.

  The exaltation of his homecoming was short-lived. Rory’s sister broke the news to him as soon as he stepped off the bus. Dear Rose had also gone missing.

  As to what came next, one can only go by the local gossip and the eventual published obituary.

  Rory O’Fey was committed to the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers just seventy-two hours after returning home to Innsmouth and learning of his daughter’s disappearance. That first night, after having imbibed a great quantity of rum, Rory claimed that he had heard his daughter calling to him from the pier. He rushed to the waterfront to meet her.

  Rory was discovered at dawn the next day, laughing and gibbering nonsense. He claimed that he had seen his Rose rise up from the churning sea. She had reached for him with arms of limp, dripping kelp. Her hair was a tangled mass of seaweed, her eyes the wide doll-dead orbs of a beached fish. Her face was a pattern of crustaceans, her mouth a pulsing barnacle that sang to him, that beckoned him, that yearned to kiss his cheek and begged him to return with her to her new home.

  Rory O’Fey died laughing in a padded cell. Rose was never discovered; her fate yet another of the secrets that swim into the cold deeps of legend.

  HELEN MARSHALL

  EXPOSURE

  HELEN MARSHALL is a Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the British Fantasy Society’s Sydney J. Bounds Award in 2013, and Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, won both the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015.

  She is currently editing The Year’s Best Weird Fiction to be released in 2017, and her debut novel will be published by Random House Canada the following year.