Innsmouth Nightmares

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Is everyone okay? Mom, Dad, Henry, the girls? Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, and knew it was substantially true—as true as it had been in our previous existence, the one Edward had shared. The statement’s truth, of course, depended on me ignoring the fact of my brother’s disappearance.

  “Well,” Edward said.

  “Where are you?” I said. “I still don’t understand. Are you all right?”

  “It’s different,” Edward said. “There are things, here…”

  “What?” I said, “What things?”

  He nodded toward the form obscured behind him. “It’s awful,” he said, his voice flaring with anger. “It’s worse than anything I could have imagined. And I think I love it. God forgive me, but I do.”

  Those were his final words to me. He did an about-face, and started walking in the opposite direction. As he drew up next to the disturbance in the air, a hand stretched out of the tumult. The fingers were long, with too many joints, capped with talons. The skin was rough, dark green spotted with whitish patches like blooms of algae. I thought it was trying to grab him, and went to shout a warning. But without looking at it, my brother, my now hopelessly lost little brother, raised his hand and took hold of the monstrous one, much as he had caught my hand when we were younger, and he was afraid.

  For Fiona

  John Langan is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, and many, many animals.

  WATER’S EDGE

  Tim Waggoner

  You approach from the southwest, traveling on foot. How long you’ve walked, you’re not sure. In the end, it doesn’t matter. All that’s important is that you’re here, or nearly so.

  The town isn’t on any map, at least not any modern ones, but knowledge of it is not unknown to certain parties. Those versed in archaic and esoteric lore, for example, and of course the military. They came here early in the last century, almost a hundred years ago now. They cleansed the town, and more importantly, the waters near its shores. After that, the town was left to the less-than-tender mercies of time and the elements. You wonder why the military didn’t raze the town—bulldoze, burn, or even bomb it—and then salt the barren earth afterward. Perhaps they’d thought their efforts offshore had been sufficient. Or perhaps they’d been so sickened by what they’d found living in the town that they hadn’t wished to spend any more time in it than their orders required. Perhaps it was a combination of both. At any rate, the town, or at least the remnants thereof, still stands.

  Why it has remained abandoned so long is difficult to say. Perhaps the government has endeavored to keep it so. Perhaps the citizens of nearby towns and villages have worked hard for several generations to blot the knowledge of this place from their collective memories. Or perhaps it’s because this land exudes an aura of despoilment, of wrongness, that induces an atavistic repulsion which keeps everyone who senses it away.

  Everyone but you, that is.

  You detect the smell before you physically reach the western outskirts. It’s coming from the river that flows through the town to empty into the Atlantic. It’s an odor of rank mud combined with decaying plant matter, one you find not altogether unpleasant. The odor intensifies the closer to the river you come. You encounter long-abandoned rail lines, their metal so corroded by neglect and the salt air that you imagine that they might crumble beneath your weight should you step on them. A road parallels the tracks, in no better condition than they are, the bricked surface cracked and buckled.

  Up to this point, the air has been still, but now a breeze kicks up as you mount the broken road and begin to proceed into the town proper. The wind comes from the east, off the ocean, the air cold and damp. It’s the kind of cold that seeps into the bone, chilling from the inside out. The sky is overcast, the clouds thick, heavy, and bruise-purple. You feel a raindrop kiss the back of your hand, and while the water fell from the sky, you know its origins are out there, beyond the town, in the gunmetal-gray waters that lap the shore. There’s history in this water, history beyond history, what geologists call Deep Time. You can feel it, hear it whispering to you across the aeons, even in this one tiny droplet. You pause to raise your hand to your face. You inhale the water’s scent—traces of stagnation, rot, and old blood—then you unfurl your tongue and touch the tip to the drop, tasting it.

  The water speaks not of life or death. To Deep Time these things are so fleeting as to be virtually without meaning. Instead, the water speaks of the movement of tectonic plates, of ocean tides shaping and reshaping the land’s contours, of stars wheeling overhead, their light traveling across vast gulfs that are not as empty as humanity might wish.

  This water is ancient, but more than that, it’s seasoned, altered by forces dark and alien—alien not just to life on land, but to all natural life on this planet.

  Your tongue—which is far longer and more slender than a human tongue should be—withdraws into your mouth and you grin. Splendid. Even better than you’d hoped for.

  More droplets fall, not a full-fledged rain yet, but definitely more than a sprinkle. A light shower might be the best term for it. The wind picks up strength, and the drops pelt you like spiked balls of ice. You’re only mildly aware of the sensation, but it doesn’t bother you overmuch. After all, water is water.

  Now that you’re well into the town, there’s a distinct odor in the air, one psychic as much as physical, a nauseous piscine smell that lingers despite the fishery having been shut down so long ago. Not that the fishery was solely responsible for the stink, but the obscenities that once called this place home have not moved through these streets with their ungainly bodies and labored wet breathing for the better part of a century. And yet their scent remains. You suppose that during the long years they were here, this smell seeped into the wood and stone, and into the very earth upon which the town rested, and the passage of a hundred years has done little to blunt its edge.

  You pass long-deserted houses and businesses, many windowless or boarded up, roofs sagging or more often collapsed. The wood is weather-damaged to the point where it’s falling apart in wet threads. Friable stone and brick are covered with greenish-black mold that appears to be the only thing preventing them from crumbling away to dust. Despite the dissolution that surrounds you, all is not silence. There’s the sound of the wind and the rain, of course, but beyond that you can hear the distant cry of seabirds coupled with lapping waves.

  You detect occasional movement in your peripheral vision, and you sense more than see shadowy forms shuffling, limping, hopping, their awkward, clumsy and sometimes spastic movements a grotesque parody of physical motion. But when you turn your head to bring the figures into sharper focus, nothing is there. They are shadows, you think. Echoes of what once was. But you’re not certain of this, and it makes you uneasy.

  You spy a patch of bare earth next to the broken road, and you walk over to it. You crouch down and push your fingers into the moist, yielding soil. You leave them there for several moments before withdrawing them. Your fingers are coated with blackish-gray slime, and you hold them up to your nose and inhale deeply, like a gourmand breathing in the scent of a fine wine. It’s the smell of corruption, and it suffuses the muck down to the molecular level. Perfection.

  You extend your hand and let the rain wash away the slime. Your flesh is not cleansed, though. It would take much more than water to remove the foul residue. Not that it troubles you. This soil—this soiled soil—is, after all, why you’ve come here.

  The rain intensifies and the wind blowing in off the ocean gains in strength. It becomes an effort to continue pushing forward, but you know that’s the point, and you don’t let it deter you. You did not trave
l so far to be easily discouraged.

  As you continue past mounds of splintered wood and cracked stone that used to be houses and businesses, you hear—despite the noise of wind and rain—a skittering, as of something, a number of somethings, moving through the debris that surrounds you. The residents of this town may have long since departed, but that doesn’t mean the place is uninhabited. When a vacuum occurs, whether naturally or not, something will arrive to fill it. It is the way of things. After all, you’re here, aren’t you?

  Whatever the creatures are, they are small. One, perhaps two feet in length. But what they lack in size, they more than make up for in numbers. You judge that there are dozens around you, perhaps hundreds. For now they are keeping their distance, which suits you just fine. You’d prefer not to deal with them unless and until it’s absolutely necessary.

  Several times you catch glimpses of the creatures as they dart through the fallen remnants of buildings. The light is exceedingly dim thanks to the dark clouds hanging overhead. Almost as black as night, and the rain decreases visibility even more. You catch only flashes of detail—hairless mottled hides, misshapen limbs, gnarled claws, twisted tails…And of course teeth: large, sharp, and numerous.

  You sense movement in the sky above you, and you look upward, rain pelting your face, striking your eyes. You blink to clear them and detect shadowy shapes gliding overhead, circling, swaying this way and that as they work to navigate turbulent air currents. You can’t make out much detail beyond their general shape—wings, beaks, legs. You hear their cries over the gusting wind, but they don’t sound like the call of gulls, rather like the angry screams of newborn babies demanding to be fed. Periodically, one of the birds dips lower, as if to get a closer look at you, but it never comes within arm’s reach.

  You lower your head and continue pushing forward against the wind. Your verminous escorts have shown no sign of aggression yet, but you know that will change, and sooner rather than later.

  At length you reach the harbor. The structures here are in worse condition than any you have seen so far in your journey through this town. More than the passage of years has been at work here, you think. Judging from the condition of the wood—what little remains, that is—you wager fire set by the hand of men was responsible. These buildings were too close to the water, too close to the contagion the military had come to eradicate, and they could not be left standing to fall apart on their own. There are no docks, and no indication that any ever existed. The military destroyed them as well.

  You can see the ocean now, water so gray it’s almost black, turbulent waves surging, leaping into the air like things alive. The storm clouds over the water are thicker and darker, and lightning coruscates over the waves, followed almost instantly by shattering thunder. Once there was a reef black as night beyond the shore, a formation that stood for centuries. There is no sign of it now. Another remnant of the past erased by the military.

  Your arrival has not gone unnoticed.

  The wind coming off the ocean doubles, triples in strength, and it’s all you can do to remain on your feet. The rain becomes a torrent, the water striking you like blades of ice. The small creatures that accompanied you as you made your way through town come slinking out of hiding now. They ignore the wind and rain as they gather in large groups, forming a circle around you, crawling over one another, snapping and snarling, biting and clawing. There is no name for these small monstrosities. They are what the town’s dogs, cats, and rats became over the course of the last century, bodies and natures warped by the corrupt ground beneath their feet. They are little more than tooth, claw, and appetite, but mindless as they are, they nonetheless heed their master’s voice, and you know they have been commanded to stop you here.

  The birds descend, the wind and rain far too strong for them to remain aloft. They fill the space left by the distorted vermin until no room remains for you to move. These creatures might have been gulls once, but their beaks are twisted, their feet more like crustacean claws, and barnacle-like growths protrude between slime-coated feathers. Tendrils emerge from the growths, wave in the air as if tasting its scent, and then retract.

  The assembled creatures make no move to attack you. They merely regard you with eyes of deep, endless black, but you can feel something else gazing at you through them. A vast intelligence, uncaring, unfeeling. Not malicious— not in the way humans use the word, anyway—but merely curious. And cautious.

  You look into those eyes and say, “I request an audience.”

  Despite the wind, rain, and thunder, you don’t raise your voice. There is no need. The creatures can hear you just fine.

  You turn your gaze seaward and wait. For several long moments nothing happens, but then you detect a bulge in the water, growing larger as it moves closer to shore. Something is coming. Something large. It moves past the spot where the reef once lay and keeps coming. When it is only a few hundred feet off shore, it breaks water and rises into the air. The vermin chitter with excitement and the birds let out their angry-baby cries. Their master has arrived.

  He has not come in his true flesh, but instead in the form of an avatar, a gargantuan body comprised of rock, sea plant, ancient bone, the splintered remains of sunken ships, and the decaying bodies of dead whale, shark, and squid. Gold threads run throughout the conglomerate nightmare like metallic veins, and despite the absence of light—or perhaps in a way because of it—those veins glow and shimmer, as if giving off the same bioluminescence of the denizens born to the deepest, darkest ocean depths.

  A bluish-white mound forms the head of the leviathan, and as you look closer, you see that it is made from the naked, bloated bodies of men and women who have drowned at sea. They cling to one another to keep from falling apart, their dead white eyes focused on you, mouths opening and closing soundlessly, like fish out of water.

  One thing you’ve always appreciated about the Old Ones is their sense of style, and this one doesn’t disappoint.

  “My lord Dagon,” you begin. “My most humble thanks for deigning to meet with me. This place—” you spread your arms—”is yours and ever shall it remain. I make no claim upon it, nor shall I ever. But the land is rich with foulness and decay, and since you’re not at present making use of it, I thought I might…borrow it for a time?”

  The avatar’s dead-white eyes gaze upon you unblinkingly. And then, without any apparent signal being given, one of the vermin shoulders its way through the mass of birds toward you. When the creature reaches you, it raises up on its hind legs, opens its tooth-filled mouth, and with a single sharp motion lunges forward and bites a chunk of flesh from the back of your hand. It hurts, but the pain is tolerable. A thick green substance oozes forth from the wound, but you pay it no mind. Instead you watch the vermin fall back down on all four feet and chew in a way that strikes you as thoughtful.

  This is it, you think. If the Lord decides against you, his servants will fall upon you and tear you apart before you have a chance to defend yourself. You are powerful, yes, but not that powerful. Not yet. There is no way you could survive such an attack, and you know it.

  The vermin chews, chews…At one point its snout wrinkles in what seems like disgust, and you fear it’s going to spit you out. But it doesn’t, and at last it swallows. The small beast looks up at you for a moment before turning and slinking away. The other vermin turn and begin moving off, and the birds launch themselves into the air and allow the wind to carry them off. You stand alone, facing the avatar. It remains motionless for several moments, but then it slowly nods once, dislodging several of the drowned men and women who fall soundlessly to the water. And then the avatar slowly recedes into the harbor until it is gone, with only a handful of floating bodies left behind to indicate it had ever been there. The lightning and thunder cease then, and the rain lets up, although it doesn’t stop entirely. The wind dies down, becoming a gentle breeze once more.

  You have your answer.

  Smiling, and in truth more than a little relieved,
you turn and start walking in the direction of the town square. It seems as good a place as any to begin. The streets there are as broken and buckled as anywhere else in town, and there are numerous places where earth is exposed. You choose one such place and crouch down next to it. The wound on the back of your hand still oozes thick green, and it is this hand which you plunge into the ground, shoving deeper, deeper, until your arm is buried to the elbow. Now you wait. It doesn’t take long.

  Soon thin tendrils begin to push their way up through the cracks in the street, stretching toward the overcast sky from which nourishing rain continues to fall. The tendrils are a mottled, sickly green, misshapen and covered with tiny thorn-like spines. They are small now, yes, but in this ground they will grow large and strong, and they will spread far beyond the confines of this town, this region, this country. And who knows? Perhaps one day, even beyond this world.

  Say what you like about the Old Ones, you think, your substance dwindling as it’s drawn into the earth to feed your children. They may be set in their ways, but they’re not opposed to new growth.

  Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels and three short story collections of dark fiction. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction program. You can find him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.

  DARK WATERS

  William F. Nolan

  “Oh, David, it’s so beautiful here!” Ellen said, squeezing his arm. Through the open window, the brisk air from the coast smelled of salt as a flock of gulls winged their way past their rental car. It had been a long journey from Charleston, but the drive was spectacular. “I can’t wait to see Devil Reef. The tourist website noted that Lovecraft used it as a location in a story once. But even he didn’t know about Cassie, the local sea monster.”

  He smiled at her. “I don’t know why you like that old hack’s writing so much!”

  Ellen frowned. “I think it’s terrible the way they call Cassie a ‘monster’ when she’s never harmed a soul that they know of.”