Allen huffed. “I wish I did, but I just need to investigate a hunch. There’ve been gangs and pseudo-religious cults that have tried to claim this area in the past. I basically need to set my mind at ease about those two cases I mentioned to you, make sure nothing bad’s happening here.”
Marc nodded. “See you in a couple hours, Sheriff.”
5.
“Look at that, Sheriff,” Deputy Mattison said, pointing to a road sign as they slowly wheeled past the ghostly remnants of Portsmouth. The cloud cover was heavy as the storm began to gather out in the Atlantic. A full moon peered down through infrequent breaks, shining on the ethereal shanties of the old sea village, creating the disquieting impression that the ramshackle buildings were the vaguely glowing skeletons of a race of dead giants. Fog had begun to roll in from the heaving, white-capped ocean just a few yards away, diffusing the scene with a diaphanous haze as it filled the narrow streets and spilled into the intersections of the darkened town, driven by the bluster whipping in from the rising nor’easter.
In the headlights, Allen could just make out the sign as they passed it, a distressed notice that once had read:
WELCOME TO BEAUTIFUL PORTSMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS
However, the lower portion of the sign had been plastered over by a decaying driftwood board with hastily scrawled red letters, which changed the message to:
WELCOME TO BEAUTIFUL INNSMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS
Allen glanced over at Deputy Mattison in the passenger’s seat, then to Deputy Sterling in the rearview mirror. “That’s odd.” A gust of wind rocked the squad car as they motored by the sign, bringing fat drops of icy rain that drummed the metal roof of the car in an arrhythmical tattoo. The sheriff flipped on the tattered wipers as the downpour began in earnest, smearing the accumulation into oily streaks on the glass. Offshore lightning distantly flashed, interrupting the inky darkness with shocks of spidery electricity, adding to the spectral ambiance of their bumpy journey.
Up ahead, they were inching ever closer to their goal: the Manuxet Nuclear Complex. Dominating the heart of old Portsmouth, the structures—especially the awesome hyperboloid cooling towers—revealed themselves before the officers like an assemblage of massive pyramids on a shimmering, black horizon.
“Jesus, this place is freaky,” Deputy Sterling said, breaking the tension.
6.
Leaving the car, the headlights of the vehicle distorted the men’s shadows into monstrous, converging shapes against the peeling, weatherbeaten entrance to the dreary Complex. Allen, his words disappearing as mist in the cold: “This is where we found a bunch of squatters before, a few years ago.” The deputies nodded. The sheriff continued, raising his voice over the rain and the violent crashing of the surf just a few hundred feet away. “We want to take notes, see what’s happening here, if anything. We can always bring reinforcements and clear it out. Keep your eyes open for evidence of the clothing with the red needlework. Be careful. You find somebody, use your whistle and we’ll muster here at the office, got it?” The others agreed.
Breaking the heavy chain on the entrance with bolt cutters, they yanked the door open and were assaulted by a wave of humid, sickly stench, like rotted flesh mingled with vanilla. While they recovered from the nauseating blast of smell, the men pulled their weapons as they steeled themselves for what might be inside.
Moving past the lobby, they carefully approached a row of massively oversized entryways. Intense, color-shifting light radiated around the seams of the doorframe. Muffled by the heavy wood of the doors, a thunderous pounding of machinery punctuated with foreign-sounding yells shook the ground. Getting into position, Sheriff Allen and the deputies prepared to open the entry. Allen cocked his head to signal the others to wrest the doors open: “Now!“
The vision on the other side was something beyond anything they could have imagined.
Inside the enormous room, the roof seemed to disappear into a limitless dome; inside the dome was a miniature galaxy. The brilliant light emanating from the cluster of stars and planets was dazzling, blinding. They stood in awe, gawking at a spectacle billions of years in the making: superheated gases and nebulae expanding at titanic speeds in all directions, glittering in fantastic hues of translucent green, mauve, yellow, blue. At the center, there was a depression which bent the light into a limitless, spiraling singularity: a black hole.
Below this cosmic display, hordes of black-shirted mutants were busily shuffling from point-to-point within the gigantic building. Some had great baskets of fish that they were moving from an area in the far back of the structure to be distributed to a line of other, larger beings that resided in the front. These latter were little more than sprawling mounds of slime-covered, warty flesh with hundreds of beady eyes, and mouths resembling spiky toothed, pulsating anuses which prolapsed outward in noisy belches to receive huge dumps of fish from the obedient feeders. The servants appeared to be humanoids similar to the things that had been washing up on the shore near Marsh-by-the-Sea.
You are intruding, Allen. The calm, toneless voice was originating from deep inside the sheriff ‘s head, splitting into his consciousness like a knife through steak, fragmenting his mind. He was unable to reply, and crumbled to the ground in agony. The two deputies were writhing on the floor, viciously clawing their faces as they soundlessly screamed in the sense-shattering cacophony.
You are interfering. We are running out of food. Your town has selfishly taken our sustenance as it has grown. Now, the storm we called is approaching, and we shall strike; our sacrifices have brought the attention of the deities, and we shall destroy your worthless city. No longer may we co-exist.
After all these long years, we shall take back what was stolen.
Allen looked to the black hole, his eyes pulsing hotly, the pressure in his head building. As his vision began to recede, he asked: “Who…are …”
We were here before your kind, and will be here well after you have returned to oblivion. Lovecraft’s book was a tool for us. I controlled the tempestuous in our midst and rebuilt our brood. With his story of Olmstead and Innsmouth, I used the lore to soothe the impatient masses—until we were ready.
The time has arrived to settle accounts, and to feast…
With that, Allen’s head exploded in a crimson shower of brain matter, blood, and bone shards; the other men had long since stopped moving, their bodies condensed to stiffened effigies coated in a balsamic reduction of clotted blood and suppurated flesh.
7.
As an unearthly procession of ghouls, specters, harlequins, and skeletons congregated that evening for the Founders’ Day Festival in the grimly decorated downtown of Marsh-by-the-Sea, the power failed.
Though the assembled crowd had an assortment of flashlights, cell phones, and candles, the storm was making it difficult to continue their solemn trek from the Olde Courthouse plaza to Founders’ Cemetery. At the edges of the throng, vendors hawking sugar skulls, statues of saints, and other trinkets were lashed by the fierce and intensifying wind and rain from the gale. Just at the stroke of midnight, the storm slammed the town in its full-throated fury, blowing down buildings, deluging the region, and causing a storm surge that rushed through the once placid avenues of the hamlet. While the angry sea flooded the area with nearly five feet of frigid, dark water, few survivors in the immediate aftermath of the disaster grasped the significance of the numerous husky, black-clad figures wading through the devastated town. At first, the luckless inhabitants of the demolished burg cried out for assistance from the uniformed patrols, believing they were rescuers—perhaps emergency personnel from the nearby Coast Guard. Only as the figures drew closer could the victims see that something was decidedly uncanny about them: tall, batrachian creatures with unusually long arms, flat faces, webbed hands, dimly glowing skin, and bulging eyes.
Into such a dreadful scenario, when the assembled masses were at their most vulnerable due to nature’s wrath and the frailty of civilization’s trappings, the creatures stalked
the unlit streets, croaking loudly with sadistic delight. Mercilessly silencing the remaining terrified masses by spearing them with huge, triple-pronged pitchforks, the beasts savagely harvested the costumed revelers for shadowy, primordial masters that no one in the throng would ever understand, ever know, or by any means accept…destined to become the stuff of nightmares and future legend—ancient hunters perfectly at ease as they worked.
As they toiled at correcting cold equations that had been so unbalanced for so long, these conquerors fit in with all the other grotesques on this fateful evening—the last Festival of Marsh-by-the-Sea.
Jason V Brock, a double Bram Stoker Award Finalist, has been widely published in magazines, online, comics, and anthologies such as Weird Fiction Review (print), S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings series, Like Water for Quarks, Fangoria, and many others. He is currently completing several novels, and is the editor-in-chief of a website and digest called [NameL3ss].
GONE TO DOGGERLAND
Jonathan Thomas
Nobody much liked Grandma Fiona toward the end. Among themselves and to our faces, social workers, nurses, housecleaners, therapists labeled her pigheaded, dotty, combative. Millie and I let it slide. For months, out of general earshot, we’d been calling her worse. And most others had better cause for acrimony. Rather than tackle the messy, unhygienic side of eldercare, we lived rent-free in return for shopping, cooking, keeping up with bills and dividend checks, providing 24-7 company and a semblance of continuity.
Given our wretched job outlook during chronic recession, we were grateful of course for no-cost shelter, and would it have killed her to reciprocate, to express some gratitude for unstinting efforts on her behalf? Instead we, her last worldly vestige of family and well-wishers, rated the same paranoid accusations of theft and shiftlessness as her other help-mates. Too bad we were only human, as apt as anyone to repay negativity in kind, and I at least regretted how soon we stooped to name-calling, in effect objectifying, dehumanizing ninety-odd years of Yankee character. But really, so little personhood shone through prickly disposition, arid patina.
I always imagined she’d die more or less compos mentis in her sleep like my paternal grandparents, and with morbid confidence and somber resignation, steeled myself each dawn for the expected shock; yet she celebrated one birthday, and another, till Millie and I started considering the house ours as much as Fiona’s, and why not? To whom else would it go?
Not that we’d be reluctant heirs, any more than she at entering middle-aged widowhood. In the meantime, dwelling under the same roof would’ve been unbearable if not for the buffer zone of empty rooms between her and us, the precious illusion of separate quarters. Her saltbox cottage was among the eccentric few to qualify as “sprawling.” Generations of owners, dissatisfied with the extra space of traditional lean-to spanning rear wall, had added ells to the sides and back and then ells to the ells, for a floor-plan resembling Lego dendrites, with a mansion’s worth of elbowroom.
At the terminus of several ells, Millie and I took refuge in the former carriage house, converted to a tourist rental in the 1920s. It afforded the property’s best view of stark, alluvial Heron Beach, and was in fact doubly secluded because Fiona’s in-laws had wielded the clout to preserve their homestead when neighboring premises too near the dunes were demolished for a conservation area. Based on the vista from any window, ours could have been the only house in the world.
Independent to a fault, Fiona disdained intrusive video monitors or intercoms, and declared she’d summon us during an emergency via her medic alert necklace and have a switchboard operator, maybe thousands of miles away, phone us six rooms over. For months she bickered about the expense of unused lifeline, and somehow dragged herself from bed each day and inched the walker ahead of her into the breakfast nook. We never suspected how perniciously far she’d declined till the incident that would’ve justified a galling outlay for the lifeline system, had she actually been wearing it.
Her oatmeal and coffee were on the table at ironclad 7:30 a.m., and untouched at 7:40. Uh-oh! Millie and I trooped through the front hall and parlor to no-show Fiona’s bedroom, where the shock in store wasn’t the one we’d expected. She was on the floor, hoarsely moaning and cussing. She’d taken the plunge into dementia by rolling out of bed.
Millie sprinted to the nightstand landline and dialed 911. I kind of fluttered around Fiona, afraid to move her, afraid not to, exclaiming her name and waving frantically to penetrate her cloud of muttering incoherence. She was scrunched up on her side, cotton nightgown like a full-length caul, fixated on jabbing her gristly thumb at the carmine disk within the white-gold medallion on a gold chain around her crinkly throat.
The emergency pendant was nowhere in evidence, and the neckwear she’d somehow swapped for it was like nothing I’d previously seen on her, or anywhere. It captured the supple power of a moray eel, flexing into a circle to catch a fleshy tail in bolt-cutter jaws. Stippled skin and jagged teeth were impeccably realistic, whereas overall lines and features, like its Mohawk of a dorsal fin, suggested the unearthly vigor, the wanton mysticism, of art nouveau, Maori tattoos, Mayan frescoes; sundry appraisers have remarked on these similarities, but none can pinpoint age or provenance.
On that pivotal morning, though, Fiona finally glared up at me and squalled, “Why’d you ignore me when I was down here buzzing and buzzing for you all night?”
Where to begin addressing that? I was flustered speechless, while more decisive Millie knelt beside Fiona and coaxed her into sitting up, resting her back against the bedframe. Naturally, Grandma was spitting mad when rescue workers rang. After they’d examined her, picked her up, dusted her off, she carped, “You had no right letting in strangers to manhandle me! I wasn’t even dressed!”
Yes, physically she was none the worse, with a hearty appetite for reheated oatmeal. The health aide and massage therapist reported no “senior moments” to us, but during a supper of Welsh rarebit and canned asparagus, her deterioration became obvious. “Where was the smoke damage?” she demanded.
What smoke damage? She’d never suffered dunces gladly. Jesus Christmas, she railed, wasn’t I there when those firemen rousted her out of bed? Weren’t they the nervous Norrises? Nothing was even singed! Was it grease in a skillet? Lit match in the wastebasket? The worry on Millie’s face mirrored mine. Whether memory, cognitive, or language impairment was shaping this outburst, it was a signpost writ large of a scary slope ahead.
“I see you have your emergency necklace again,” I noted, thankful for an excuse to change the subject. “Where had it got off to, when you had that other jewelry on?”
“What do you mean?” she snapped. “I always wear this damn whoozis. I pay too much not to.”
Conversations ever after with Fiona tended toward such no-win dead ends. The ongoing round of suits and uniforms assisting her took non-sequiturs in stride, outwardly deaf to them, probably accustomed to loopier. They seemingly thought no less of her than when she was merely crotchety.
Genuine communication occurred more and more rarely, on her emergence from stream of fragmentary consciousness, that isolated realm where she’d first landed upon tumbling from bed. By and large she’d slipped the moorings of circadian rhythm, floating adrift through her life story. She threatened to spank me for busting in before dawn when I woke her from her La-Z-Boy nap at suppertime. Or she’d denounce me as an impostor, since everyone knew I was stationed in Italy! It eventually clicked that she’d conflated me with her wartime casualty husband.
No, Fiona was by no measure competent and belonged in a long-term facility, however strident her denials. Unfortunately, the law was on her side. We had no power of attorney, and obtaining it, warned our health-industry professionals, was complicated, costly, and protracted. As next of kin, we were entitled at best to approve procedures ad hoc, such as treatment for Fiona’s fast-spreading, sudden-onset psoriasis, and slow-healing lesions sustained in bedroom mishaps.
Hence two or three new speciali
sts joined Fiona’s daily carousel of caregivers, the more the merrier for Millie and me. How fortuitous that we had more time to ourselves even as Fiona became more unmanageable, and to clear our heads, where better than the beach? But this wasn’t the enchanting seascape of my boyhood, despite its abiding features of tidal flats, dunes, and seawalls, any more than Fiona was the same charming hostess.
Out there was a surface that might be placid or agitated or foggy, with no indications of what went on underneath, just as Fiona’s past was hidden by her changeable surface and always had been, except in broadest strokes. She’d married my late mother’s father and had always lived by the ocean. It was impossible to picture her anywhere landlocked, even one town inland. Of where she grew up, of her people, I knew nothing, except they weren’t from the spousal stomping grounds of Ipswich and Gloucester.
Ironic, wasn’t it, Millie proposed, that here was our gilt-edged chance to really get acquainted with Fiona, when she was about as forthcoming as an oyster? Surreal utterances aside, Fiona had severed contact with this world, none the wiser if we invested our idle hours organizing and purging nine decades of her biographic clutter, like spelunking from storeroom to storeroom in the chambered nautilus encasing her soul. Who could say it was too soon to locate the will, the deed to the Colonial saltbox, the title to the classic Eldorado?
We’d hardly lifted a naive finger before the magnitude of crushing labor hit us. To archive photos alone involved rummaging for albums on shelves behind dusty sofas, through drawers of framed portraits in the guestroom’s bed, in kitchen cupboards with Fotomat packets accordioned between bookends of chipped mugs, or in slots meant for 78s beneath the turntable of an archaic clawfoot Victrola. Further hundreds languished even more obscurely. I had to revise my opinion that ours was the most overdocumented era thanks to smartphones, Facebook, CCTV, the N.S.A. Nope, cheap cameras had opened the informational floodgates by 1900.
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