Innsmouth Nightmares

by Edited by Lois H. Gresh

  6.

  When even the solar system was young, a fledgling, Pre-Archean Earth was kissed by errant Theia, daughter of Selene, and four and a half billion years ago all the cooling crust of the world became once more a molten hell. Theia was obliterated for her reckless show of affection and reborn as a cold, dead sphere damned always to orbit her intended paramour; she’s a planet no more, but only a satellite never again permitted to touch the Earth. And so it is that the moon, spurned, scarred, diminished, has always haunted the sky, gazing spitefully across more than a million miles of near vacuum, hating silently— but not entirely powerless.

  She has the tides.

  A dance for three—sun, moon, and earth.

  She can pull the seas, twice daily, and twice monthly her pull is vicious.

  And so she has formed an alliance with those things within the briny waters of the world that would gain a greater foothold upon the land or would merely reach out and take what the ocean desires as her own.

  For the ocean, like the moon, is a wicked, jealous thing.

  Hold that thought.

  Cats, too, have secrets rooted in antiquity and spanning worlds, secret histories known to very few living men and women, most of whom have only read books or heard tales in dreams and nightmares; far fewer have for themselves beheld the truth of the lives of cats, whether in the present day or in times so long past there are only crumbling monuments to mark the passage of those ages. The Pharaoh Hedjkheperre Setepenre Shoshenq’s city of Bubastis, dedicated to the Cult of Bast and Sekhmet, where holy cats swarmed the temples and were mummified, as attested by the writings of Herodotus. And the reverence for the Tamra Maew shown by Buddhist monks, the breeds sacred to the Courts of Siam, the Wichien-maat, Sisawat, Suphalak, Khaomanee, and Ninlarat. In the Dream Lands, the celebrated cats of Ulthar, whom no man may kill on pain of death, and, too, the great battle the cats fought against the loathsome, rodent-like zoogs on the dark side of the moon.

  Cats upon the moon.

  Star-eyed guardians whose power and glory has been forgotten, by and large, by humanity, which has come to look upon them as nothing more than pets.

  The stage has been set.

  Here’s the scene:

  All the cats of Innsmouth have assembled on this muggy night, coming together at a designated place within the shadowed, dying seaport at the mouth of Essex Bay, south of Plum Island Sound, and west of the winking lighthouses of Cape Ann. The sun is finally down, and that swollen moon has cleared the Atlantic horizon to shine so bright and violent over the harbor and the wharves, over fishing boats, the meeting hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and over all the gabels, balustrades, hipped Georgian and slate-shingled gambrel rooftops, the cupolas and chimneys and widow’s walks, the high steeples of shuttered churches. The cats take their positions along the low stone arch of Banker’s Bridge, connecting River Street with Paine Street, just below the lower falls of the Manuxet. They’ve slipped out through windows left open, through attic crannies and basement crevices, all the egresses known to cats whose “owners” believe they control the comings and goings of their feline charges.

  The cats of Innsmouth town have come together to hold the line. They’ve come, as they’ve done twice monthly since the sailing ships of Captain Obed Marsh returned a hundred years ago with his strange cargoes from the islands of New Guinea, Sumatra, and Malaysia. Strange cargoes and stranger rituals that set the seaport on a new and terrible path, as the converts to Marsh’s transplanted South Seas cult of Cthulhu called out to the inhabitants of the drowned cities beyond Devil Reef and far out beyond the wide plateau of Essex Bay. They sang for the deep ones and all the other abominations of that unplumbed submarine canyon and the halls of Y’ha-nthlei and Yoharneth-Lahai. And their songs were answered. Their blasphemies and blood sacrifices were rewarded.

  Evolution spun backwards for those who chose that road.

  And even as the faithful went down, so did the deep ones rise.

  On these nights, when the spiteful moon hefts the sea to cover the cobble beaches and slop against the edges of the tallest piers, threatening to overtop the Water Street jetty, on these nights do the beings called forth by the rites of the Esoteric Order seek the slip past the falls and gain the wetlands and the rivers beyond Innsmouth, to spread inland like a contagion. On these nights, the Manuxet swells and, usually, is contained by the quays erected when the city was still young. But during especially strong spring tides, such as this one of the first night of August 1925, the comingled sea and river may flood the streets flanking the Manuxet. And things may crawl out.

  But the cats have come to hold the line.

  None among them—not even the very young or the infirm or the very old—shirk this duty.

  Essie and Emiline Babson’s tom Horace is here, as is shopkeeper Bertrand Cowlishaw’s plump calico Terrapin. The three tortoiseshell kittens have scrambled out from beneath Frank Buckle’s front porch to join the ranks. All four of Annie Phelps’ cats—Darwin and Huxley, Mary Anning and Rowena— are here, and a place of honor has been accorded Mister Bill Bailey, the heroin addict Ephraim Asher Peaslee’s enormous Maine Coon. Bill Bailey has led the cats of Innsmouth since his seventh year and will lead them until his death, when the burden will pass to another. All these have come to the bridge, and five score more, besides. The pampered and the stray, the beloved and the neglected and forgotten.

  By the whim of gravity, the three bodies have aligned, sun, moon, and earth all caught now in the invisible tension of syzygy, and within an hour the Manuxet writhes with scaled and slimy shapes eager and hopeful that this is the eventide that will see them spill out into the wider world of men. The waters froth and splash as the deep ones, hideous frog-fish parodies of human beings, clamber over the squirming mass of great eels long as Swampscott dories and the arms of giant squid and cuttlefish that might easily crush a man in their grip. There are sharks and toothsome fish no ichthyologist has ever seen, and there are armored placoderms with razor jaws, believed by science to have vanished from the world aeons ago. Other Paleozoic anachronisms, neither quite fish nor quite amphibians, beat at the quay with stubby, half-formed limbs.

  The conspiring moon is lost briefly behind a sliver of cloud, but then that obstructing cataract passes from her eye and pale, borrowed light spills down and across the Belgian-block paving running the length of River and Paine, across all those rooftops and trickling down into alleyways. And there are those few, in this hour, who dare to peek between curtains pulled shut against the dark, and among them is Annie Phelps, distracted from her reading by some noise or another. She sees nothing more than the water growing perilously high between the quays, and she’s grateful she has nothing of value stored in the basement, not after the flood of ‘18, when she lost her entire collection of snails and mermaids’ purses, which she’d unwisely stored below street level. But she sees nothing more than the possibility of a flood, and she reminds herself again how she should move to some village where there would be crews with sandbags out on nights like this. She closes the curtain and goes back to her books.

  Two doors down, Mr. Buckles sits near the bottom of the stairs, his 12-gauge, pump-action Browning across his lap. He carried the gun in France, and if it was good enough to kill Huns in the muddy trenches it ought to do just damn fine against anything slithering out of the muck to come calling at his door. The shotgun is cocked, both barrels loaded; he drinks from his bottle of bourbon and keeps his eyes open. Even in the house he can smell the stench from the river, worse times ten than it ever is during even the hottest, stillest days.

  On Banker’s Bridge, Bill Bailey glares with amber eyes at the interlopers, as they surge forward, borne by the tide.

  Farther up the street, Essie Babson looks down at the river, and she sees nothing at all out of the ordinary, despite what she plainly hears.

  “Come back to bed,” says Emiline.

  “You didn’t hear that?” she asks her sister.

  “I d
idn’t hear anything at all. Come back to bed. You’re keeping me awake.”

  “The heat’s keeping you awake,” mutters Essie.

  “Have you seen Horace?” Emiline wants to know. “I couldn’t find him. He didn’t come for his dinner.”

  “No, Emiline. I haven’t seen Horace,” says Essie, and she squints into the night. “I’m sure he’ll be along later.”

  Bill Bailey’s ears are flat against the side of his head. The eyes of all the other cats of Innsmouth are, in this moment, upon him.

  Above his store, Bertrand Cowlishaw lies in his bed, exhausted from a long, hot afternoon in the shop, by all the orders filled and the shelves he restocked himself because Matthew was in and out all day, making deliveries. Bertrand drifts uneasily in that liminal space between waking and sleep. And he half dreams about a city beneath the sea, and he half hears the clamor below the arch of Banker’s Bridge.

  Bill Bailey tenses, and all the other cats follow his lead.

  Something hulking and only resembling a woman in the vaguest of ways lurches free of the roiling, slippery horde, rising to her full height, coming eye to eye with the chocolate Maine Coon.

  Its eyes are black as holes punched in a midnight sky.

  Ephraim Asher Peaslee floats, coddled in the gentle, protective arms of Madame Héroïne; after a long hour of pleading, he’s been permitted to re-enter the White Lands, where neither the sea nor the moon nor their demons may ever come. He isn’t aware that Bill Bailey no longer sits near the cranberry velvet chaise lounge. And the radio is like wind through the branches of distant trees, wind through a forest in a place he but half recalls. He is blissfully ignorant of the rising river and the tide and the coming of the deep ones and all their retinue.

  The scaled thing with bottomless pits for eyes opens its mouth, revealing teeth that Annie Phelps would no doubt recognize from the jaw she found on the shingle. Dripping with ooze and kelp fronds, its hide scabbed with barnacles and sea lice, the monster howls and rushes the bridge.

  And the cats of Innsmouth town do what they have always done.

  They hold the line.

  They cheat the bitter moon, with claws and teeth, with the indomitable will of all cats, with iridescent eyeshine and with a perfect hatred for the invaders. Some of them are slain, dragged down and swallowed whole, or crushed between fangs and gnashing beaks, or borne down the riverbed and drowned. But most of them will live to fight at the next battle during New Moon spring tide.

  Bill Bailey opens the throat of the black-eyed beast that once was a woman who lived in the town and cared for cats of her own.

  Mary Anning is devoured, and Annie Phelps will spend a week searching for her.

  One of the kittens from beneath Frank Buckles’ front porch is crushed, its small body broken by flailing tentacles.

  But there have been worse fights, and there will be worse fights again.

  And when it is done and the soldiers of Y’ha-nthlei and Dagon and Mother Hydra have all been routed, retreating to the depths beyond the harbor, beyond the bay, when the cats have won, the survivors carry away the fallen and lay them in the reeds along the shore of Choate Island.

  When the sun rises, there is left hardly any sign of the invasion, or of the bravery and sacrifice of the cats. Some will note dying crabs and drying strands of seaweed washed up along River and Paine streets, but most will not even see that much.

  The day is hot again, but by evening rain clouds sweep in from the west, and from the windows of the Old Masonic lodge on New Church Green the watchers watch and curse. They say their prayers to forgotten gods, and they bide their time, patient as any cat.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and the New York Times has declared her “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in twelve volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently she’s editing her thirteenth and fourteenth collections—Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume

  2) for Subterranean Press and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales for Centipede Press. She has recently concluded Alabaster, her award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She will soon begin work on her next novel, Interstate Love Song, based on “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8).” She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  SOME KIND OF MISTAKE

  S. T. Joshi

  “A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday.”

  —New York Times (May 12, 2014)

  1.

  I was far from home, but an obscure necessity of a sort I could neither specify nor discount drove me on. I was in Bury St. Edmunds, on the road that leads to Innsmouth.

  Those who know anything of the history of New England will say that the only Innsmouth they know about is an obscure coastal town in Massachusetts—one that was the locus of some unspecified police or military action in the late 1920s and which never subsequently recovered the prosperity that it had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. It was then a bustling city whose economy was based on fishing and on a gold refinery that dominated the downtown section. What, then, was I doing across the Atlantic in late summer, heading toward the east coast of England?

  Better-informed persons will tell you that most towns in New England have their analogues—or, at any rate, the origin of their names—in the Old Country. How many know that England boasts a tiny and insignificant village named Boston? The county seat of England’s Suffolk is Ipswich, whose namesake in Massachusetts lies uncomfortably near Innsmouth. And Suffolk’s Dunwich—the medieval town crumbling inexorably into the North Sea—lent its name to another town in Massachusetts that many would like to forget.

  And so I was heading to the Suffolk Innsmouth, for reasons I could not have articulated even if the melancholy that clouded my mind had been lifted.

  At Bury St. Edmunds I found the massive but nondescript Victorian railway station and took the train to Ipswich, but from there I had no option but to rent a car—in spite of my unfamiliarity and discomfort with driving on the “wrong” side of the road—for I was curtly informed that there was neither train nor bus service anywhere near where I wished to go.

  I slipped into a Ford Focus whose steering wheel on the right side of the front seat disconcerted me. As I tentatively ventured onto the baffling British freeway system, I noted that the roads became progressively smaller and more poorly maintained; it also interested me to come upon still more analogues— exact or approximate as the case may be—for cities and towns back home: Framlingham (the presumable origin of the Boston suburb of Framingham), Boyton (perhaps the source for Boynton Beach—another obscure town that conjured up vaguely distressing memories), and so on. As I approached the coast, the road degenerated into a bizarre fusion of dust and gravel, and my fear of inadvertently driving in the wrong lane and crashing head-on into an incoming truck (or should that be lorry?) gave way to an augmented terror of encountering any traffic at all on what had insidiously become a one-lane road.