Innsmouth Nightmares

The tugging. Old self swirling in mortal issues. Lonesomeness. Same train. Loathing the brutish-thing in the mirror. Same track. The Outsider’s one remote chance at victory nicked, plucked at, open—suffering and broken.

  One of the girls on the boat laughed again. Fun. Summertime. All day all weekend, the waves of life, swelling, rolling…

  No hope. Then.

  No use for hope now. Not this kind.

  A beachball more suited for dialogue with sunnynoon swells flew over the side. The waves played with it. Oth’rnya-l’yi closed his eyes. If he’d waited two more years, or five, could he have outrun, or sidestepped, the aches?

  On the boat a couple had their arms around each other, had their hands on each other—his was on her ass pulling her closer, and she let him. They kissed, open mouth to open mouth, each breath rippling devouring. Happiness—passion. Freedom, no indictments, no poisoned almosts. Struck by the heat, Oth’rnya-l’yi was glued to the sight.

  The fingers of his right hand stroked the scaly-webbing between those of his left as he stared at the couple, at their math of flesh. Again he came back to Danny unspooling, Danny his pieces of unbearable. Danny that was hurt and wasn’t happy in the thin, pale skin of his fragile human state. Would the universe or the coherence below have cared if he had not come home to Innsmouth? Could he have grown into manhood in the human world and discovered his hands holding something of value?

  On the yacht, Phil, speaking with wild hands, sailed Ally’s curves. Ally’s luscious mouth brightly widened as it painted a responsive yes.

  Oth’rnya-l’yi bobbed and watched the wild dance; the hunger of man-boy curtained by his face sunk its teeth into the erotic vision and would not abdicate. Bitty piece of moon got swallowed by a bank of clouds; he eased closer and aft to view the kids better. He needed to see.

  Touch.

  The vivid of a gorgeous roulette assailed him. Acrobatics, cheerleader’s thighs, upside-down, panties. Mallory, shining and sweet. Cartwheels.

  The titter of abundant Ally stole his gaze.

  Details. Her black hair. Her forearm. Her long thin fingers, dancer’s legs. How her profile seized the light, and from this angle, the avalanche of her poetry ripped open his blurs of hopeless. Her lips parted slightly to accept the filtered-tip of her cigarette, and even this slow undecorated motion was lavish. Lips…exhale, cherry ice cream, their invitation amplified by not moving. The first time he viewed the sea, at hightide, he let the view stab his heart with its heightened tableaux, and was changed forever by its authority and its beauty. She was as powerful.

  Heat.

  Craving—

  cherry ice cream lips, her forearm,

  her soft fingers gently holding

  the cigarette.

  Mallory. Silk-smooth and smiling, both a hammer and a feather. His last glimpse of human before he dove into the waves under the vast cloak of blue that had become so strange to him and embraced his ancestry in the city below Devil Reef.

  Beyond the broken shells and the feathers in the little rivers in the wet sand, that first step, contact with the sea. Cold foam that was only frigid for a second. The water rose, the wave splashed over his ankles. The next higher. He stood there, accepting, waiting. Then the soft and salt was over his knees, then up to his crotch.

  Stood there.

  No longer a prisoner, no longer formed of inconsistencies and the battering rains of landlocked. All the expressionless Thursdays stockpiled with dead bodies…gone.

  Left the surface for liquid articulations of surfaceless. Didn’t look back.

  No lurching. Not shunned, not a broken inadequate thing lost in the morgue of fear.

  Below. Quicker than the night’s black cloak fleeing a vivid morning sun, he returned home. Turned and dove and left the victims of the wrecked promises of dark-voiced streets.

  Far from the North Shore and the seedy docks of Innsmouth, rotted and shunned by tourists hoping to enjoy the Massachusetts coastline, and far below the waves of Devil Reef was Y’ha-ntlei. Closed to the sun and air and human pollutants, the city of the Deep Ones thrived.

  Early on, Oth’rnya-l’yi wondered about the huge architectural constructions that were perched atop the giant columns. Why do they look like sundials when there’s no sunlight down here? Other questions arose, and over time, all were answered. Slowly discovering his new realm, the purpose of each mega-structure and jewel and hieroglyph-covered pillar and the grand design of the boulevards and antechambers that defied the relentless abrasions of countless ages, he found his way and his place. Disregarding specialization and innovation, and the decline and growth of millennia, never-silent salt dented nothing here.

  Immortal, never frustrated by waiting in the shadows of fear, to wither or fall prey to the ills of aging. Growing stronger in the body, he never looked back at human. His days and years here, below, had healed one thing, but neurologically and spiritually, slain another. These young humans, laughing victors on celebration day—with intense fingers, there on the lamp-lit deck swaying, showed him all his waiting all his unsaid, he, a sailor with no brave flag and many holes in his tiny boat.

  Youth, some days a dumping ground where he struggled with bewilderments and all the institutions of afraid. Youth, harder without compatriots.

  His to and fro

  (hands too small to play

  or hold the dream)

  going to and

  toward

  (carrying his cellars of not,

  and no, and wrong)

  Feverish.

  These beautiful kids. Painted in joy.

  Joy. Is it that easy?

  Danny never kissed a girl, never held a hand. Never looked into a mirror without seeing a beast. He read poetry, knew and sang along with the hopeful songs of the day.

  Could Danny pilot his future away from the rain in this cave? Could a person, a woman trumpeting darling invitations present a route away from being pronounced dead? In silence he searched for an orchard.

  He wanted fire, wanted vertical.

  Looked

  saw his hands.

  Asked his tongue to set aside winter and create a ripple to possible.

  The girl on the boat was beautiful. Hypnotic. She was that crazy ray of moonlight coming ashore that causes the heart to send its exclamations into the dell of soul and flesh.

  She was powerful.

  Her naked shoulder bewitching.

  Her tummy an atoll.

  Chills of delight leapt from his chest to his hips when her lashes beat.

  She was freedom.

  The scent of her, its prowess, unlocked memories of the shore, all the things that slipped through the door and his fingers.

  The fingers of his left hand stroked the webbing between those of his right. Could he have grown into it? The kids on the boat were young and wild, but he’d seen others when he first came to Innsmouth, mature humans, quietly comfortable with their lives. They’d sailed without suffering and didn’t need to fathom the mysteries of the Great Above and the Great Below.

  His mother had died of a stroke at thirty-six and the authorities put him in the county home. Danny in a 14-bed gallery of undebatable rules and stern regulations. Frightened. Not knowing his place, not able to sleep. Disdained. Flesh in a river of agony. Danny in a non-human world of frigid mechanisms and hard facts…and bed checks.

  A prisoner in the county home. The whole first month of April, he felt like a target. May arrived, but there was no motion of feathers to climb to a balcony where Juliette had opened the curtains and stood, every drop of her blood steady with yes and more.

  Days.

  Weeks.

  The hallways of the prison.

  Eyes—

  constant weapons aimed at him

  and no shelter.

  Glancing at the massive old clock on the mantelpiece in the dour community room, wanting to trick its streaming NO. No good days. Put to bed, never tucked in with happy little dreams. Thinking EXIT.

  Seven weeks lat
er, the prisoner bolted from the deadends of Schenectady. Hitchhiked, sat on a bus when he thought it safe, and walked east. Massachusetts. Innsmouth. Toward a place his mother had mentioned when she was taken by a long bout of fever before her passing. Innsmouth. “A tangle of chimney-pots and unpainted steeples. The harbor and the white belfry. Decay, and gold. My father’s house…My oath to Mother Hydra.” Whispered, “Innsmouth. The blue expanse of the Atlantic.” Cried as she said, “Cousin Ida said, wait and you’ll find purpose. Maybe I should not have run?”

  Home? A place for a chance to breathe?

  Family?

  A place away from the shipwreck.

  A prayer.

  A place outside fear.

  A vision of the sea consumed him. He could smell the perfume of salt, see the gulls arc, hear them oboe their song above the soft waves. The sea was full of live, a bosom under a sky that pinned no calendar to pleasurable.

  Home. Hope on the husk of his limbs.

  The siren-waves sang in him, stole his senses, declared peril would vanish.

  The trek from desolation. It was a long trip. Close to a month on bark-bordered backroads and despair-lined streets, across fields, through wooded acres of pine and maple, headed East, dry or wet, outside the standards of style and etiquette. Danny slept where he could, stole bread and a roll of quarters from an unlocked Chevy in the parking lot of Sears, Roebuck & Company, took garden vegetables, ate wild berries and many rural apples, passed the nest of a robin. Ran and ran.

  Wind. Windows. Morning followed by a long day. Hitchhiking. Hiding followed by a long night. Mile markers. It was a long trip. Road signs. Pieces of tires that could not make the trip. Rain. Innsmouth. Innsmouth. The sea of dark water called him and blinded him to events and shapes framed by brick and mortar and green.

  He came to the ocean. Innsmouth, air thick with the smell of fish, the reef ‘s breakers playing in the rocks. Houses filled with Marshs and Gilmans, Waites and Hoggs. Uncle Sebastian looked him over and shook his hand. They knew his name. Taken in by cousins. Accepted.

  A new geography and new modes of reasoning. Accounts and addresses came from mouths. Scaly hands opened grimoires, demonologies, and scriptures. Instructions given. Ancient histories of Old Times and Old Things still lurking, the conceptualization of unaussprechlich and incomprehensible.

  Rites.

  Choosing the gifts of the tides and shoal. Otter-like, playing in the reef, diving in the kelp.

  Fear’s weeds became ghosts ignored.

  Transition—leaving human, warm blood to cold blood, new eyes, gills, his shape and skin and musculature and its behavior, his consciousness, illuminated, altered.

  Truth.

  From poverty and defeat, he left air and went into the immortal blue, to the Kingdom that had no North or midnight.

  Glory.

  Y’ha-nthlei.

  The city of the mapless deeps.

  Home.

  In the canyons hidden below the cold dark waves, in the icy, cloistered deeps. Home. Among his kind. The outsider’s commotion of fears no longer a shattering bane, weakening his posture and musculature. A celebrant of Her Glory Mother Hydra, Oth’rnya-l’yi had become an unmovable thing, human expunged from his devotions as the other Deep Ones intertwined with the inhabitants of Innsmouth. The fear that pushed him to the town of his forbearers and the tugging that placed him among the columns and traditions of Y’ha-nthlei, were swept away by the unnamed girl on the yacht sipping from a wine glass.

  He leaned.

  She looked from the rim of her glass to the moon.

  He was a poet. She was an angel. In his trance, she was making him, remodeling from his memories and reborn desperation.

  Her image, how the moonlight painted it, tapped at him. He moved closer. She exhaled; he strained to catch her breath, any trace of her perfume.

  He hoped she’d speak, even a single word. Just her voice—

  He pushed aside salt to allow the scent of her light to kiss his lonely.

  She was an artist and he was in progress, giving his whole. He wanted to do, or offer, something that would catch her eye..

  Closer.

  The curve behind her knee possessed his control.

  Should I wave, splash about, or offer, hello?

  Closer.

  Dredged up, love songs he never got to try on and books of obsession that bedded down with his iron misery. The pressure of the deep supplanted by the insist of his memories. He was caught in her cage and weaving.

  Closer.

  Sparks of primal fun. Sexmusic rustles. Sugar and uncorked genies purred across the deck. Dancing, rubbing essence, a smooth leg, urgent, deliberation gone in the snap of fingers. Pausing to drink. Laughing at you, laughing at me. Hands touching, willing, guiding, darling. A kiss.

  Closer

  seeing.

  Clinging.

  Back to Earth and the soft things of land. Danny sighed, parted his lips to push out the flower of his I will in language—

  She turned. Moved her foot, dropped her glass, wanted to refuse what she saw.

  Other Deep Ones had risen and were beside him. They moved toward the boat—

  Blood in the water.

  Floating. The man Danny might have become shredding.

  (for a kind and lovely lady in Providence)

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the author of the novels, The Orphan Palace and Nightmare’s Disciple. His stories have appeared in anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Black Wings, The Children of Old Leech, Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His collections, Blood Will Have Its Season, SIN & ashes, and Portraits of Ruin, were published by Hippocampus Press. He edited A Season in Carcosa and the Shirley Jackson Award winning The Grimscribe’s Puppets. He has two upcoming collections, A House of Hollow Wounds and The Protocols of Ugliness. Joe is currently editing several anthologies, including Cassilda’s Song, The Leaves of a Necronomicon, and Born Under A Bad Sign.

  BAUBLES

  Nancy Holder

  A mask of gold hides all deformities.

  —Thomas Dekker, 1572–1631

  “Let me see it again,” Eric said, reaching between the seats of August’s Fiat to grab Mia’s arm. He practically wrenched it out of the socket as he held it up to the lowering sunlight and cocked his head, examining the gold cuff on her wrist. “I so want one of these. What if they’re all gone?”

  “I told you, man. They had at least a dozen.” August’s smile was the same one that had captivated Mia on the first day of senior year, an affectionate smirk, a little bit superior, but very warm, tinged with worldly-wise compassion. It represented the many layers that were August Magnusen. He was a complicated person. She liked to think that she was too, and that that was why he’d given her the cuff for her birthday, November first. She was finally eighteen, a legal adult.

  It was nearly Christmas now, and snow piled at the bases of endless humpbacked, arthritic pine trees plagued with flaking trunks; the sky was dark for early afternoon even in New England. He was driving a little too fast for the unfamiliar, twisty, one-lane road and Mia’s other hand was glued to the armrest. Her stomach was jumping and she was just about to ask Eric to let go of her when August slid a glance into the rearview mirror and said with mock anger, “And stop manhandling my woman.”

  Eric did not stop. “I want to get one of these for Jane.” He ran a finger over the ornate surface. “It’s so…so weird. But cool-weird. When you move it around…” His voice trailed off “… I almost can’t see it anymore.”

  August’s smug smile widened. “I know, right?” He mouthed “Jane,” at Mia, and Mia managed a little smile in response. She was trying not to be judgmental, but everyone knew that “Jane” was “Jack” and that he lived in Gloucester. And that despite Jack, Eric had his eye on someone closer to home. A lot closer. In the car, in fact. And it wasn’t Mia.

  As they careened around a corner, a faded sign frosted with ice read “INNSMOUTH 2 MILES” and her grip on the armrest tightened
. The momentum threw Eric off balance, and he released her arm. She wrapped her fingers around her shoulder seat belt. The car’s tires stuttered for purchase, and for one second, Mia thought they were going to spin out. August slowed down and his smile vanished. He hunkered forward and gazed intently through the windshield. The mood in the car changed along with him, tense now. As if it was time to get serious.

  “Jesus, don’t kill us,” Eric muttered.

  The road cut sharply to the right, leading the car into a maze of shadowy forest that blanked out the sunlight. Despite the lack of light, Mia’s gold cuff bounced reflections off the roof and the dashboard, kaleidoscoping, dervishing. Golden bubbles formed, popped, became cobalt silver pearlescent purple acid green swirled, danced, disappeared, blossomed.

  Alex turned on his high beams, and they illuminated a greenish-white fog drifting across the road. Dark shapes lurched into the woods as if avoiding the headlights; as Mia turned her head and narrowed her eyes to make them out, Eric blurted, “Shit.”

  They had escaped the forest, and the car balanced on the crest of a hill. Below, beyond a derelict bridge spanning an ebony river, the ruined town of Innsmouth—or what remained of it—lay before them. Nearly every wooden structure, many dating from Colonial times, had burned to the ground in the 1930s, and a mere scattering of those had been rebuilt. For the most part, only stone buildings remained, wearing blackened stripes as if eighty years of winters had not weathered away the soot. Ramshackle roofs hung at canted angles so that the top stories nearly touched over narrow alleys. Two weddingcake steeples cut silhouettes into the horizon.

  “Dude, are you kidding?” Eric sounded pissed off. “This is it?”

  August eased the Fiat down the grade, and they began to trundle across the bridge. The rhythmic jostling suggested that it had once served as a train trestle and minimal effort had been expended to retrofit the bridge for cars. The waters churned; to Mia’s left, rocks jutted, forming a reef.

  On the other side of the bridge, August pulled the car into a snowy expanse that might once have served as a parking lot. Eric was sputtering under his breath as August killed the engine. Mia opened her car door and got out, slipping on her coat. Beneath the snow there was gravel. A sharp wind slapped her cheek, and she rewrapped her bright red woolen scarf around her chin and cheeks. The air reeked of decay: stinking seaweed, rotting fish. The stench was thick enough to coat her skin. She pulled her matching red gloves from her coat pocket and slipped them on.