Innsmouth Nightmares

  She’d turned her head then, and her mouth was so red, and he’d thought she was looking at him, but it quickly became clear she was gazing at the ground behind her, the sandy beach, which was moving.

  She’d tried to get away from it. She never would have left him if she could have helped it. She’d always been devoted to him, despite her flaws.

  He didn’t know where she was running. He’d only been eight, but even then he’d understood that the ocean wouldn’t have helped her.

  The sand trailed up and her gown began to fall away. He was embarrassed and closed his eyes, but forced them open again as the hazy softness of her went dark. Later his father would hold the empty gown and ask him if he had seen anything. And he would say he had not, because he had not.

  Whitcomb opened his eyes and saw the drift of tiny particles on the beach in front of him; felt them float in and out of his mouth, in and out of his ears. Red bits and soft bits, and an endless streaming of sand.

  A lifetime later he sat out in front of his room, taking in the ocean, taking in all the sand. He was missing pieces. He could not remember why he had come here, just that it had been a compulsion, beyond important, but that memory was useless to him now. As were all other memories, scoured and taken and blown away by the wind. But it was almost a relief to see them go.

  He gazed down at his sweatpants, which were almost empty now. He began to smile, but could feel that even bits of his smile were gone.

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s latest novel Blood Kin (Solaris), alternating between the 1930s and the present day, is a Southern Gothic/Horror blend of snake handling, ghosts, kudzu, and Melungeons. His previous Solaris novel was Deadfall Hotel. Coming late Spring of 2015: In the Lovecraft Museum, a standalone novella from PS Publishing. Later this year Centipede Press will be collecting the best of his uncollected horror stories in Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors. And in 2016 Solaris will present his dark SF novel Ubo, a meditation on violence as seen through the eyes of some of history’s most disreputable figures.

  THE IMPS OF INNSMOUTH

  W. H. Pugmire

  Kasumi Mizu felt the dilapidated pier on which she stood sway in the force of wind and waves. Dark water churned before her, beneath an equally murky sky; and although she knew that the large reef was out there somewhere, she could not catch sight of it. She soaked in the spray as the waves crashed against the rotting wood, and she moaned in accompaniment to the wind that chortled at her ear. The stench of Innsmouth was like some sinister bouquet, and she sucked in the liquid air through mouth and nostrils. A sudden gust of potent gale assailed her, and Kasumi had to fight to keep her balance on the moist pier. Behind her came a pounding of wood on wood that echoed beneath the bawl of windstorm.

  “We cannot accomplish our task if you drown. Come off that wharf and follow me.” The younger woman turned to face the crone, and her sense of wonder was triggered once again by the sight of the elder woman. Edith Whorl’s long gray robe and cloak flapped in the frenzied windstorm, as did those strands of white hair that spilled from underneath her garment’s hood. The eyes behind her thin mask reflected the darkness of water and sky; and Kasumi wondered how old that mask was, for its frail texture had cracked in places, giving the faux countenance a fantastic façade, like a face that was beginning to split in ruin. One gnarled and scarred hand grasped the solid cane on which the woman leaned, and the other hand reached toward the girl on the pier. Kasumi sighed and walked to the beckoning one, who led her off the structure of decaying wood; but before she took the other woman’s hand, she turned once more to gaze at the movement of sea.

  “I’ve never been before such a body of water—it’s overwhelming! I’ve always lived so entirely in the city. I seem to feel the flow of tides inside my veins, mingled with my blood. The fishy smell of rot in the air is nauseating, but I keep wanting to suck it in deeper and deeper.” Bending, she poked a finger into the marl on which they stood, then rose and admired the thick black substance that stained her flesh. “Even the mud smells vile—and yet I want to scoop it up and plaster it all over my face and let it sink into my pores.” Gazing directly at the older woman, she laughed. “I feel kind of crazy.”

  Edith took hold of the young woman’s finger and pressed it to the flesh over her breastbone, transporting the filthy stain into the sallow wrinkles of her skin. “Smooth, cool, ancient, this substance. Let us go.” She moved away, into the misty air, until her figure took on the aspect of a cloud of sentient smoke. Kasumi rushed to her companion and clutched a portion of the woman’s cloak. She let the woman guide her through the empty streets until they came upon the shop that was their destination. They stepped through the threshold, out of the wind, into a dusky realm of smoke and silhouette. Kasumi drank in the fragrance of scented candles and pungent powders, of ancient wood and artifacts of the past. She heard the subtle grinding sound before she espied the black woman who, seated at a table, worked with mortar and pestle.

  “Sit, child,” the woman said, motioning to a vacant chair. “Your eyes will adjust to the gloom of this chamber. I am just preparing the paste. The seaweed that I crush is especial to this region; but this pill of crimson chalk is of a far more esoteric substance, herbs from Africa and Egypt compacted with elements of Innsmouth clay.” She suddenly ceased her working of the club-shaped instrument and lifted her head so as to peer into Kasumi’s eyes. “How youthful, your eyes, so brimming with wonder. Your brain, bewitched by what have seemed memories, has dreamed of rare weird things, visions that have led you to us. What a curious thing is Time. We exist in cycles, our chemistry subject to their ways and rules. We are pawns to unseen powers, just as the tides are disciplined by pull of moon. It is excellent that it is so. Now then, this is ready. Edith, come mark her. It must be worked by one of Innsmouth blood.”

  There came the sound of the elder woman’s cane hitting the chamber’s wooden floor; and with the thud came a shifting of light, for Edith had taken up one stout candle and carried it to the table. “My eyes are not as functional as your young orbs. Let me set this candle just there.” She bent toward Kasumi and placed a withered hand under her chin. “How fair, your face. The candlelight plays beautifully in the green and gold of your eyes. But shut your eyes now, as I anoint ye.” Kasumi did as she was instructed, and when the cool semi-liquid paste was applied to her forehead she made a little moan of pleasure. When antique fingers touched her mouth, she parted her lips so that those fingers could smooth the mortar’s ingredients to the roof of her mouth. She listened to the force of the wind at windows, and thought she could hear the other women breathing alien words beneath that sound of storm.

  “Let us go and walk in the wind, Dolores, and leave our daughter to her dreaming.” Kasumi heard movement in the room, but did not care to open her eyes. She was too enamored of the shapes that moved across her eyelids, and of the smells of Innsmouth that seemed to seep into her from all around. There was the smell of the sea, and of the peculiar properties of Innsmouth mud. These odors mingled with the fragrance of olden things with which the curious shop had been infused. Kasumi could feel her brain unfold its wings and knew that she was dreaming; but this was a dream of sensations only, for in this vision she existed within a void of blurred mists and fogs. A sudden sensation, potent and unyielding, encased her—the surging of the tides of Innsmouth, and the graceful movement of the denizens of those waters. She swallowed, tasting the mixture with which the roof of her mouth had been coated as it oozed down her throat.

  The smell of smoke sank into her nostrils, and when at last she opened her eyes, Kasumi saw the other women standing beside her at the table. The candle’s flame had been extinguished, and although the room was dark she could just make out the thin wisps of smoke that coiled from the candle’s wick. The door to the shop had not been shut, and looking past it to the outside, she noted that night had fallen. There was no longer any movement of wind, and the only sound was the whimper of winged things that glided over the wide expanse of sea. Lookin
g at the oldest one among them, Kasumi thought that the woman’s thin mask looked more weathered than before, and she noticed a newborn crack in its surface, just below the left eye.

  “Come with me now,” Edith whispered, “to the place where you belong. You have tasted it in deepest dreaming, and your senses have brought you to Innsmouth at last. Come claim your heritage of slime and rapture.” Not waiting for any response, Edith turned and passed through the doorway, leaning heavily on her solid walking stick as she moved beneath soft moonlight. Kasumi followed, looking at the night sky with its scattered clouds and scant starlight. The atmosphere of the venerable seaport had altered absolutely. Everything was still and silent, and the young woman felt as though she wandered as a spirit in some forsaken ghost town. How chilly the moonlight felt upon her eyes. That distant sphere had never looked so white, so near. It appeared as a daemon that called to her tides of blood, that pulled her to whatever destiny awaited her. They walked to what remained of a neighborhood north of the river, and Kasumi’s heart sank at the sight of the charred remnants of what were once habitations. Portions of burned buildings tilted beneath the moonlight, resembling scorched skeletons of primordial beasts that had been caught within some holocaust.

  Edith had stopped and was looking at the ruins, and her mask looked awful in the bright moonlight. Going to her, Kasumi took hold of the woman’s hand. “Won’t you remove your mask and show me your face?” The elder creature shook her head slowly; and then, lifting her heavy cane, she pointed it to the burnt ruins.

  “There is my face, before you. I was still young, not quite thirteen in mortal years, when they came to annihilate Innsmouth, when they herded those of us they did not find impossibly repellent. The others, in man’s superior judgment, deserved no less than utter obliteration. They did not bother to remove my kindred from the rotting old habitations, did not hesitate with their bombs and burnings. I hid in a closet—but fire has a way of finding one. I was able to wind wet protective cloth around my hands, so they are but lightly scarred. My face was not so fortunate. You find my camouflage grotesque, I know—but you would find what lies beneath it far more monstrous.”

  Edith continued her trek, leading the way to the harbor. Kasumi walked behind her, down a series of rough-hewn stone steps, onto sand; and she wondered at the stone archway toward which they walked, an erection that seemed unnatural in this setting. Vivid moonlight drenched the structure, and Kasumi gaped incredulously at the circular design that had been carved onto its highest point. Unhurriedly, she began to unbutton her blouse, and when she turned to Edith the lunar illumination revealed the symbol that formed a raised scar above her breasts—an emblem that resembled exactly the sigil etched onto the arch.

  Leaning heavily on her stick, Edith pondered the silence of the place. “Everything is so silent. Not like the olden days of my youth. Then Beltane was a time of ceremony, of sacrificial fire and spilt blood. We moved in morbid danse and collided in lust.” She nodded her head and emitted a low chuckle. “Oh yes, there were good reasons to avoid Innsmouth in those times, if one was from outside. But then the prosaic-minded men arrived, and the order of Innsmouth ways was dismantled. How unimaginatively they murdered us. Our various breeds were stolen from us, or fled to far-flung regions. Some may never find their way back.” She turned to gaze at Kasumi, and her eyes smiled. “But others have returned, drawn by the tatters of magical influence that could not be exploded or set on fire. Our city beneath the sea could never be destroyed by paltry humanity. We dream there still, and our dreams are conjoined to the Lord of R’lyeh. Yes, they have, in their way, destroyed Innsmouth; yet in so doing they will reap a greater harvest of extinction. We will know again their cries of horror and the sweet perfume of their slaughter, magnified and magnificent. My kindred will celebrate on Devil Reef, and your kind will rise from the slime and dance beneath the dead moonlight, as you will dance tonight.”

  There was a rising of wind, and the hushed sound of waves crawling onto land. Impossibly, the moon grew brighter in hue as Edith began to hum an outré melody, as she stepped to the archway and kissed its aged stone. Dropping her walking stick, the elder creature fell to her knees and began to etch sigils in the moist sand. She clawed into the silt and brought a segment upward, forming the stuff into a ball. Tenderly, she set the ball down and lifted her arm over it. Sharp moonlight shone on the talons of her other hand, those pointed implements with which she pierced the flesh of her out-flung wrist. Hot liquid spilled from her wound onto the ball of sand. She then held out both hands to Kasumi. Instinctively, the young woman removed her clothing and let them fall on the ground. Steadily, she stepped to the archway and passed through it.

  The wind grew powerful, and the smells of Innsmouth intensified. Oh, how the young woman could feel the movement of the tides inside her. A memory of dreaming flexed inside her skull, bringing rare language to her lips. She sang a song of Innsmouth alchemy, and the muck around her began to respond. Something moved beneath the ball of silt that Edith had formed— something elfin that stretched upward out of the moist sand. Edith clapped and laughed, and then she dug her talons once more into her flesh so that hot blood spilled onto the creature. Kasumi saw the other places of movement beneath the sand. Making an inhuman sound, she crept to Edith, grabbed one of the woman’s hands, and raked its talons over the flesh of her arm. How liberating it was, to watch her mortality spill from her.

  They manifested around her, out of the dark sand, the wee gray things that shuddered as they took on solid form. Kasumi hunkered onto the sand so that she could kiss the nearest creature, and she laughed to find that it tasted similar to the paste with which her mouth and forehead had been anointed, that stuff of which Innsmouth seaweed was one essential substance. She wallowed in the muck as the small beings crawled over her and coated her tingling flesh with Innsmouth clay. Her mind was hot with awe as she saw Edith tilt over her, as she realized how gigantic the ancient woman had become. Happily, she raised her transfigured arms into the air and struggled onto her tiny legs. Joyously, she moved with her newfound kindred in the harbor, beneath the tremendous brilliance of lunar light, around the hoary child of doom-shadowed Innsmouth, the fabulous creature who finally removed her mask and howled ecstatically at the moon

  Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been writing Mythos fiction ever since he was a young lass in the early 1970s, at which time he became an obsessed Lovecraftian lunatic. His newest collections are In the Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales, written in collaboration with David Barker (Dark Renaissance Books) and Monstrous Aftermath (Hippocampus Press). Pugmire dreams in Seattle.

  THE OPEN MOUTH OF CHARYBDIS

  John Langan

  You know how the story ends before it’s even begun. No one had any memory of my brother, Edward, except me. Instead of five children, three boys and two girls, my parents had an equal number of sons and daughters. Photos in which Edward was sandwiched between our brother, Henry, and our sister, Jane, now showed Henry and Jane smiling beside one another. Drawings for which he had won the CYO art contest year after year, their accompanying gold medals, were gone from their position in the hallway, with no difference in the paint to mark where they’d hung. The silver maple in the backyard, whose trunk Edward had attempted to saw through, as revenge for Jane falling off one of its lower boughs and breaking her arm, showed no grooves at its base. Henry and I shared a room in which each of us had a single bed, not the bunkbed and single bed the three of us had argued over for years. Our room was still too small for all our possessions, but without Edward’s drawing table filling one of its corners, there was space for a bookcase for me and a desk for Henry.

  More had changed, besides. It seemed I was the artistic one now, while Henry was the academic prodigy. Jane was suddenly famous for her stubbornness at the dinner table, and Victoria, the youngest, was known for her intense Catholicism. Gone were my years as a wide receiver for my high school’s junior varsity and varsity football teams. Gone was Henry’s abil
ity on the guitar. Gone was Jane’s facility with foreign languages, Victoria’s knack for the mechanical. Our parents were different, too. Dad was no longer a manager at IBM, which meant he was home earlier, but the family budget was tighter. Mom was prone to more and worse migraines, spending her days behind a pair of large sunglasses. Four kids still meant a busy household, but there was a current of melancholy threading through our relations, impossible to account for, almost as if it was a collective response to an absence no one was aware of.

  My younger brother vanished from existence while the family was on a trip to a place of which there is also no trace. Ask the rest of them where we passed the last week of July, the first of August, during the summer of my senior year of high school, and they will tell you Maine, a town called Bucksport, on the Penobscot River. They’ll describe day trips to Bar Harbor, to Acadia National Park; they’ll talk about the night our parents took us to dinner at Jed Prouty’s, the nicest restaurant in town. None of them will have anything to say about spending the same two weeks north of Boston, in and around Gloucester. They won’t recall taking the train into Boston to visit the Aquarium. They’ll have no recollection of driving through Newburyport to the village of Mason, on the northeastern end of Plum Island.

  But we did, all of it. We went on a whale watch out of Gloucester, and Mom became seasick, and had to take a Dramamine and lie down on one of the ship’s benches. We followed the walkway that wound up and around the Aquarium’s enormous cylindrical fishtank, waving to the divers floating within, feeding the fish. We parked in Mason’s single municipal lot, which was located next to its dilapidated docks, and Edward, Henry, and I set off in search of the Marsh House, the museum Edward had asked to visit, because it had a small painting by Paul Gauguin, with whose art he was obsessed. Our parents, who elected to browse the waterfront’s abbreviated row of shops with our sisters, told us to meet them back at the car in two hours, which seemed like more than enough time. The village was little more than a few dozen narrow streets, and the museum was not far. At seventeen, I was in charge of Henry (fifteen) and Edward (fourteen), a position I made certain to verify with our parents. “Just behave yourselves,” Dad said.