I was prepared for death—prepared either to die from drowning or from hypothermia. Warm as this late August day had been, the chilliness of the water with the advent of night could scarcely be doubted. And yet, as I inexorably followed Gilman’s downward course through the waves as if tied to him by some invisible but unbreakable tether, I experienced an amalgam of unprecedented sensations—the seamless and anomalously pleasurable flowing of water through my nose and mouth, the extraction of oxygen there-from, and the expelling of the water through what I was compelled to acknowledge were my gills; the perception of warmth and envelopment that the water lent to me, a perception that I had never experienced on even the sunniest days in the open air; and, most harrowing of all, an unmistakable sense of fitness as I sank—no, swam—down, down, eternally down to the depths, with Gilman constituting an imperious beacon that compelled me to follow. I belonged here in the sea as I had never belonged on land.
I could imagine the wonders and glories to which Gilman would lead me—an underwater city analogous to Y’ha-nthlei, the sunken city off Devil Reef whose temples, colonnades, and alien-carven statuary had, as I now suddenly recalled, filled my dreams from infancy. Was I now, in spite of my initially hostile intent, to be accepted as a true and respected member of the submerged realm on this side of the Atlantic? Would my mere intent to cause harm to the Deep Ones be forgiven as readily as the actual harm caused by that hapless half-breed Olmstead had been forgiven so many decades ago?
I began to sense a gradual lessening of the impenetrable blackness of the water ahead of me, and felt we were approaching our destination, whatever that may be and whatever role I would play in it. But the sight that actually met my eyes was beyond prediction, and beyond comprehension.
With uncanny elegance, Gilman abruptly halted in the midst of a plunge and with a sardonic wave of his arm urged me to take in the scene that suddenly burst upon my vision. I brought myself up next to him and frantically sought to understand what I saw.
To be sure, a city of nearly incalculable extent lay spread out before me on the ocean floor. Whether the dominant material that had gone into the construction of the homes, temples, and other structures was of marble or limestone or some substance unknown to the surface world, I was unable to conjecture. It was difficult enough for me to absorb the exquisite but utterly alien carvings, bas-reliefs, and filigreed ornaments that covered almost every inch of each building, the cumulative work of uncounted centuries and uncounted millions of hands. The very streets, wide and lavish as in any metropolis of earth, were painstakingly decorated with mosaics of exquisite intricacy, while the pillars and colonnades of the more substantial edifices evoked a titan majesty that dwarfed even the noblest analogues of Greece and Babylon. And although I had never been to Y’ha-nthlei but had only heard dimly whispered accounts of it from my family, this immense and complex habitation in all likelihood stood in relation to its Massachusetts counterpart as Angkor Wat stands in relation to a hastily built sand castle on a beach.
What I did not see were any occupants.
As if sensing my puzzlement on this score, Gilman suddenly shot forward and made his way along one of the main avenues bisecting the megalopolis. I unthinkingly obeyed his unspoken command to follow; and as we approached an imposing structure that I took to be a house of worship, I felt I had no recourse but to drift after him as he made his way inside.
I did not attempt to count the number of bodies that lay piled in disarray in every corner of the building. These Deep Ones had all but lost whatever superficial human attributes had been theirs when they dwelt on the surface; but the loathsome gray-green hue of their skin bespoke a corruption so vile, and at the same time so pitiable, that my emotions whirled, reeling from disgust to terror to bafflement to heartrending sorrow. The popping eyes, the round pustules that covered the creatures from head to foot, the gaping wounds that revealed a skeletonic structure that seemed strangely melted or fused—all these things I absorbed in a single glance. My horror of individual decay was overwhelmed by the appalled perception of cumulative annihilation.
It was the same from one structure to the next, as Gilman scornfully led me through what had become an inconceivably vast mortuary of the Deep Ones. My brain was numbed at the sheer scale of the cataclysm—it was as if we had by some dreadful mischance ventured on a battlefield where not merely thousands, but millions, had met their deaths in every possible manner. Not a single living specimen was visible to us—although there were, in grim irony, some strangely glowing deep-sea organisms who had somehow survived the destruction, heedlessly floating around and through some of the Deep Ones as if no longer fearing their erstwhile foes and rivals.
But perhaps the worst sight was something I glimpsed as, sickened, I silently begged Gilman to return me to the surface and away from this Everest of death. As he cynically agreed to my request, we turned and began our ascent. But as we passed an edifice that seemed to have been under construction but left unfinished, I saw to my horror some amorphous mass whose exactly outlines I could not entirely descry. The object appeared to be flat, approximately round, and mostly black, although with irregular patches of gray or brown; there were also a nearly incalculable number of the pustules— some of them oozing an unhealthy green ichor—of the sort I had seen on the dead Deep Ones.
I knew then that I had at last seen a shoggoth—but it was a shoggoth whose impressive prowess as a beast of burden was permanently ended.
5.
“Can’t you even now guess the truth?” Gilman taunted me.
We had returned to the claustrophobic room into which I had been thrust when I had first been brought to meet my perceived nemesis. For all the sense of comfort I had initially felt when plunging into the waves, I was relieved to have returned to the surface and into the normal attire belonging to the human side of my ancestry.
I shook my head dismally, scarcely able to utter a sound.
“Your education seems decidedly deficient,” Gilman went on in mockery. “There is something ironically fitting in what happened down there—especially fitting for us half-breeds, you and I. For all my disdain of humanity, I am forced to acknowledge that I remain half-human—how I wish I could tear my body to shreds and hurl that half to perdition!
“I had such great plans,” he continued in a curiously soft, almost pleading voice. “Such plans for the extirpation of the surface denizens of this long-suffering globe. But you beat me to it! It is you—your species (for you obviously ally yourself to your human half) that caused that decimation below. It was your collective actions—actions that you now mask under the bland euphemism of ‘global warming’—that will be the ultimate exterminator of both of our species.
“The cumulative effect of the last half-century is to have raised the temperature of the oceans by only a few degrees, and also to have increased their acidity—but that was enough! For creatures of such delicate constitution as the Deep Ones—yes, delicate, for the fact that we are hybrids means that every one of our physiological reactions is balanced between extremely narrow poles—the slightest change in our environment is fatal. If these changes had occurred gradually, we might have been able to adapt; but the rapidity of the transformation, especially in recent decades, was beyond our capacity to absorb.
“This was why I, who had previously regarded humans as a minor nuisance whose destruction we could not bother to undertake, felt the need to take action at once. But I was too late! The reports of underwater deaths had first come as a trickle, then in greater and greater numbers—and you know all too well what the final outcome has been. Y’ha-nthlei has, I daresay, perished as well, to say nothing of the dozens of other colonies that we established in all corners of the earth—or, rather, under it.
“My only consolation is that humans have condemned themselves at the same time that they heedlessly and unwittingly brought death to the Deep Ones. For the effects of ‘global warming,’ as your own scientists admit, are irreversible. Your planet is doomed, t
he human species is doomed.”
In a trembling voice that paradoxically mingled intense satisfaction and a kind of objective pity, Gilman went on: “The human species was never meant to rule this earth. It was all some kind of mistake. And now, through its own greed and folly, it is hurtling down an ineluctable path toward rectifying that error. My only regret is that I shall not be around to witness the culmination of this ridiculous tragedy.”
With a wave of the hand, Gilman dismissed me, as if I encapsulated the “minor nuisance” that the entire human species had once represented to him.
“You’d best run along home. You have no place or function here. There is no need to worry that I am a menace to your ‘civilization.’ I can do nothing now. I will remain on the surface as long as my body can endure it; then I will plunge beneath the waves and join my brothers and sisters in a death that I now welcome. If I were you, I would seriously consider doing the same.”
As I trudged away from Innsmouth and sought to return to my now empty and futile life across the water, I began to suspect that I would do exactly that.
S. T. Joshi is a widely published critic, scholar, and editor. But he has also written mystery and horror fiction, including the novels The Removal Company (2009), Conspiracy of Silence (2010), and The Assaults of Chaos (2013), along with short stories that have appeared in such anthologies as The Acolytes of Cthulhu and That Is Not Dead. He is the editor of the anthologies Black Wings I–V (2010–16), Searchers After Horror (2014), and A Mountain Walked (2014), as well as of the journals Lovecraft Annual, Spectral Realms, and the Weird Fiction Review.
Innsmouth Nightmares
First published by PS Publishing in 2015. This eBook edition published in February 2016 by PS Publishing by arrangement with Lois H. Gresh; individual stories Copyright © 2015 by the individual contributors.
All rights reserved by the authors. The right of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Cats of River Street (1925) Copyright © 2014 Caitlín R. Kiernan, first appeared in Sirenia Digest #102
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-84863-362-9
Cover design by Ben Baldwin
PS Publishing Ltd
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Hornsea, HU18 1PG, England
[email protected]
www.pspublishing.co.uk
Contents
Unnamed
Unnamed
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
WINDOWS UNDERWATER
WINDOWS UNDERWATER
Unnamed
Unnamed
COLD BLOOD
COLD BLOOD
Unnamed
Unnamed
FEAR SUN
FEAR SUN
Unnamed
Unnamed
THICKER THAN WATER
THICKER THAN WATER
Unnamed
Unnamed
STRANGE CURRENTS
STRANGE CURRENTS
Unnamed
Unnamed
MOURNING PEOPLE
MOURNING PEOPLE
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE BARNACLE DAUGHTER
THE BARNACLE DAUGHTER
Unnamed
Unnamed
BETWEEN THE PILINGS
BETWEEN THE PILINGS
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE IMPS OF INNSMOUTH
THE IMPS OF INNSMOUTH
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE OPEN MOUTH OF CHARYBDIS
THE OPEN MOUTH OF CHARYBDIS
Unnamed
Unnamed
WATER’S EDGE
WATER’S EDGE
Unnamed
Unnamed
DARK WATERS
DARK WATERS
Unnamed
Unnamed
A GIRL’S LIFE
A GIRL’S LIFE
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE SEA WITCH
THE SEA WITCH
Unnamed
Unnamed
BROOD
BROOD
Unnamed
Unnamed
GONE TO DOGGERLAND
GONE TO DOGGERLAND
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE SCENT OF THE HAMMER AND THE FEATHER
THE SCENT OF THE HAMMER AND THE FEATHER
Unnamed
Unnamed
BAUBLES
BAUBLES
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE WAVES BECKON
THE WAVES BECKON
Unnamed
Unnamed
THE CATS OF RIVER STREET (1925)
THE CATS OF RIVER STREET (1925)
Unnamed
Unnamed
SOME KIND OF MISTAKE
SOME KIND OF MISTAKE
Unnamed
Unnamed
Innsmouth Nightmares
Innsmouth Nightmares
Innsmouth Nightmares Page 32