FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales

by Burke, Jessica

  “My mom says your stuff is garbage!” Tommy shrilled at Silas, who simply smiled and asked the terrorist tween if he’d like to try something. The boy made a deep, phlegmy noise in his throat. Silas stepped back, uttering soft, sibilant words of rebuke, admonition, and contempt, while asking Father Dagon to consume the child, his mother, and all their wretched kindred. There has to be something wrong with your head if you don’t like ice cream.

  “If you spit again at me Tommy, remember your mother will have to pay another fine in court.” Last summer, after Tommy threw an outright tantrum, spitting and throwing rocks at Silas, a bystander filmed the incident on her smart phone while her brother called the police. Tommy had sped away well before the police arrived. The video, however, was enough for them to visit Tommy’s home. Along with the fact that they had already become intimately familiar with Tommy for other neighborhood incidents including vandalizing a sandwich shop for selling meat, snatching an elderly woman’s purse while he sped by on his scooter, overturning gravestones in the local cemetery, and tying two live puppies to either end of a jump rope and tossing them in a tree outside the police station. One puppy didn’t survive the incident because Tommy tied the rope around its neck, while the other suffered an amputated rear right leg after the leg had shattered so terribly, becoming infected. The pooch had been adopted by the precinct as a kind of 3-legged mascot. After Tommy had attacked Silas, Silas prayed extra hard and tried tempting Tommy with a new ‘vegan’ sorbet that was a tad stronger than the Golden Kraken— to no avail.

  “As I told you last year, Tommy, Maxfield’s does have special dairy-free sorbets that contain no animal products.”

  The boy simply grunted and sped away, his tight little face squinting while he bit his lip, clearly having forgotten that he actually might face time in a juvenile detention center if he again attacks another member of the community.

  *********

  Not realizing how long he had been sitting in the kitchen, his hands clutching the remains of his whiting lunch, Silas licked bits of white, smoked fish from his fingertips and washed the taste down with the cooled remains from his large mug of Jyssamin’s herbal tea. Since he had started drinking the tea last night, the coughing had gradually diminished to almost nothing, while the pain in his innards and his head had also slowly dissolved. The tea made him more than a tad wistful, giving him vivid memories bordering on hallucination, which made his routine tasks like eating rather laborious. He found himself staring into the mirror last night, after having had his first cup, holding his toothbrush and simply watching himself, while his mind was reliving almost every story Grandfather Fern had told him about the idols, symbols, and prayers that were important to his people. Hence the reason why Silas decided, after managing to actually put toothpaste on said brush, successfully brushing his remaining 7 teeth (fish-frogs do not boast many teeth after all), and crawling into bed, to record everything. That complicated task only took Silas little under an hour to complete, since he paused to relive the first time he had learned about the importance the proper idols required and sacrifices to be conducted for tomorrow’s ceremony. While pulling his pajamas over his swollen legs, he stood woolgathering about the ceremony, his pants still round his ankles, and how Jyssamin, the self-professed family historian, would be the eldest left on land after him, the head of the family after he went back to the waters.

  Silas recalled that all of his siblings had taken their first swim in these waters and he would do the same in little more than a day’s time. When each of his siblings, cousins, nieces, or uncles, took to the water for the first time many family members would surface from the deep channels below. Many only surface for the rites of passage for each new youngling taking to the sea. However, to honor his Billop ancestor and Grandfather Fern who had taken the same name, Silas would enter the water from Conference House Park. By swim, Silas meant no lighthearted aquatic romp, but an intense dive down to Y’ha-nthlei for an extended period of time. The particular parts of the ceremony Silas had memorized were a unique blend of his people’s ancient traditions from before Innsmouth, along with Staten Island traditions stemming from a time when it was still called by its indigenous, Algonquin name Aquehonga Monacnong, Island of Darks Woods on High Ground.

  Silas chuckled while pulling his pajamas up over his knees. The name was a linguistic twist on an earlier name remembered by local history. In actuality, it had been given by his ancient Staten Island kin who had many generations ago taken to the sea, but only now, with the popularity of Maxfield’s and the resurrection of their own kind, were returning for a time to the island. They were helping to school him and his siblings in the Old traditions and so help to prepare his people for their transcendence. They explained that their Staten Island family branches had a near 10,000 year history.

  Geologically, Staten Island was at that time, part of the New Jersey landmass. Some of them had seen it, having been in Y’ha-nthlei for nigh on that long. Fishing and other skills of the sea they had taught the indigenous humans, a breed more respected by Silas’ kindred than the current ape descendants cavorting on the little blue green planet. Being connected to the mainland, the area now known as Staten Island possessed a larger southern shore, which was reported to have extended an additional 25 miles or so than it does today. There was no body of water known as the Arthur Kill separating Staten Island and New Jersey. Because of the respect Silas’ forebears had for the native peoples, there was a borrowing of tradition for both cultures. Many idols Silas’ kin now used came initially from these tribes, whose success from the sea came both from his ancestors and from the Deep Ones themselves. A rift arose between different tribes, and it was said that a portion of the island was drowned by angry Deep Ones who had not been paid the right fealty.

  Silas finally pulled his pajama pants up, slipped both arms into a voluminous black t-shirt sporting a large, silver, Jesus-fish with tentacles sprouting from its body, and pulled it over his round, completely bald head. Meanwhile he reflected on how he had sorely missed both his parents and how his spawning, along with that of his siblings, had been especially painful for his mother as he had been told. She had managed to stay on dry land until a few months shy of the seventh anniversary of his spawning, before his Father came to take her below, into the deep in order to properly heal. In that way, she took after her own great aunt, Aunt Julia’s mother Isadora. Silas hoped when he would take his first swim and visit their homes in the deep, interacting with the elders of his people, that he would recognize his father who Silas only knew in human form. It was possible, by now both his parents may have fully transformed— a fate Silas himself looked forward to. As Grandfather Fern had told him, Silas was a kind of prince the like of which Obed Marsh could never hope to understand, who would one day return their kind to former glory. Unsure of how exactly this would happen, Silas scrambled beneath light blankets, and laid back on a pile of pillows.

  Overall, he supposed vivid, hallucinogenic daydreams were better than the gut-wrenching, horrifying pains he had experienced at lunch the day before and then just before ending his route. He had fallen asleep thinking about his sister, but upon waking, he easily found his recorder in the bedside table— where he had left it last winter after trying to capture an electronic voice phenomenon in the room that just turned out to be a hissing radiator.

  When he woke that morning, he had resolved not to have more of the tea until he had set himself up to record his reverie. This he had been doing successfully until midday, and with significantly less pain and discomfort. Finishing the last of his tea, Silas disposed of the fishbones, and washed up the kitchen before shuffling back to his recorder, table, and window. The action took him little more than 45 minutes, and he only reminisced about the first time he himself visited Snug Harbor in a strange non-linear fashion perhaps 4 times. As he again sat down, he was able to see over the treetops the waves rolling and the clouds swirling. The thunder and rain had long since blown themselves out, but the wind was stil
l churning. The afternoon was waning, but he still had plenty of time. Pressing record, he went back to his verbal reverie.

  *********

  “The influx of relatives did swell our numbers, but that was the point. Maxfield’s specialty ice creams—with the goodness of the sea—didn’t exactly help us blend with the natives so to speak, but helped them blend with us. Some were meant for the change, perhaps having ancient connections from one of our several clans already casting a grey-green glimmer to their blood. Others would be altered enough to make them more, shall we say, delectable offerings when the time came for the Great Rising, when mother would return as the Thousand Faced Moon and Aunt Julia would return at her side as Lilith. My sister, Lispeth, Aunt Julia’s mother Isadora, and Grandfather Fern’s beloved Lenore, would stand in as Mother’s handmaidens: Gorgo, Mormo, and Ereshkigal. Father would undoubtedly return, leading an army of our kind. The priests would make offerings, the sacred songs would be sung, and I would rise. Staten Island and our kin in New York had made a city greater than Innsmouth ever was. When I claimed my seat alongside Father and Mother, we would travel to Y’ha-nthlei and—

  “I get ahead of myself again. Forgive me. I find it all so exciting. It took Obed Marsh generations and he failed. His people were worms slithering in shadows, scuttling beneath rocks. Because of Aunt Julia and Grandfather Fern, we have, for the first time, the ability to show our faces if you will, and— because of the damned American ape government and their unwitting contribution to our plans— this was all accomplished in less than a century.

  “Granted, it was almost lost utterly after the Innsmouth disaster. The Federal raids seized paper records, and what wasn’t taken, was destroyed in the fires and ceaseless use of dynamite of all things, both on land and off. But, they also seized people, in the scores. Many were killed in the fires. Grandfather Fern had 37 brothers and sisters. His father had had 72. And there’s no true accounting of how many cousins, nieces, nephews, and other assorted relations they both had. Our people do spawn from time to time and to hear the list of names would be like listening to the list of ‘begats’ from the Christian Bible. Believe it or not, during those raids, all of his siblings disappeared, along with those assorted cousins, nieces, and nephews. Camps were set up north of Arkham and even on the grounds of Miskatonic University. I’m sure there were many more, but we ultimately only found out about the ones in Stanford, Long Island, and, as it turned out, two on Staten Island. The initial one was only to have been a temporary holding station for about three score men at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, in the basement of a wing in their hospital. But when Snug Harbor received some much-needed income from Uncle Sam to turn a blind eye, so to speak, about all the electro-shock, surgical, and other types of testing done on those patients, those men were never moved to where they should have gone: an equally dismal place called the Farm Colony at Seaview Hospital. Grandfather Fern managed to change all that from a horrifying negative, to a strange sort of positive.

  “The year after Khrushchev stumped the podium in the United Nations with shoe in hand, Aunt Julia finally shuttered Maxfield’s in Warren, hung up her broad-brimmed hat, and took to the sea. The remaining Rhode Island clan resettled in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and places north along the New England coast, keeping away from most of Massachusetts— harsh sentiments still pervading the area after Innsmouth. However, we still have family floating around Narragansett and Arkham. So many went to the sea with Aunt Julia that much of Rhode Island and all of Massachusetts wasn’t our home-base any longer. With the exception of Arkham, its own harsh past making Innsmouth seem a mere fantasy, the towns around Massachusetts held too many bad memories for my kind. I suppose you could say there were now, for us, shadows in Innsmouth. Much of the town itself was destroyed—both on land and out to the reef. Either on the tab of the American taxpayer or through what Obed Marsh had done himself, going back to the supposed ‘epidemic,’ his damnable riots, and those blasted sacrifices. Old Obed meant well—but he was a greedy codger and really didn’t have our people at heart.

  “And when Aunt Julia took to the sea, unlike Grandfather Fern, once she saw Y’ha-nthlei there was no coming back, no breathing foul air nor listening to the amble of the primates around us. The full effect of what had happened after the raids hadn’t reached her until the scant handful of years before she left. Surreptitiously, she had always harbored the hope that there were more of us who had escaped in secret, more who fled north or took to the waters. That’s partly why Jyssamin, and Lispeth before her, were sent overseas. Even Grandfather Fern sent his beloved Lenore with their sons to the South Pacific to search for any who may have escaped. Nothing was learned, no evidence of the old islanders remained, and Grandfather’s children spread to other Nests to keep them running smoothly. What Lenore had learned caused her to retreat with other High Priestesses, and ultimately they left for the waters together about the same time Aunt Julia did.

  “What spurned Maxfield’s ice cream into the consciousness of Staten Islanders was actually the key to us turning the tide so to speak: Sailor’s Snug Harbor. When Grandfather gifted the sailors that ice cream, it went without saying that amongst the routine flavors, the strawberry and vanilla, chocolate and almond, he donated dozens of gallons of our specialty flavors, not the family ceremonial ones and certainly not Golden Kraken, those would be for later. But it was only our duty to experiment on them as they had on us, and many of those old greybeards had fish blood already. When Grandfather Fern and his cousins brought crates and barrels of our frozen confections up from the docks by the campus’ North Gate on Richmond Terrace, he saw in the wizened faces that watched from the street above enough of the Innsmouth look. Starting there was the right decision indeed. But taking the shipment from ship to shore would bring Grandfather face-to-face with what the government had really done after the raids.

  “Beneath the concrete bulkheads leading from Richmond Terrace down to the the docks of Sailors’ Snug Harbor was a network of tunnels connecting every building in the 130 acre complex. Snug Harbor wasn’t only home to retired sailors, merchant marines, and other sea farers from all over the world. It was home to a massive hospital built like the spokes in a wheel, or the points of a misshapen star. The complex ministered to the sailors’ needs, but also housed a tuberculosis hospital and, there was speculation it even housed a home for mentally ill sailors. When Grandfather came to Sailor’s Snug Harbor with his gift of ice cream and transformation, the campus was on the decline and barely a quarter what it was in its heyday before the war. But the tunnels still connected the docks with the kitchens, the houses with each other, and it all with both the hospital and the mortuary.

  “Snug Harbor not only boasted its own hospital, but its own gardens, farm, smithy, and dairy, its own church, theater, and library—and even its own cemetery. And since the hospital’s hundreds of residents habitually never left through the front doors, the tunnels made it easier to move things below ground that the civilized eye would quake to look on. At the time when Grandfather came, all that was changing. The livestock would be sold and the smithy closed in a scant handful of years. The hospital too was undergoing a change and soon, that, too, would be closed—and its surviving patients shipped elsewhere.

  “While Grandfather loaded the carts and supervised the unloading of the rest of the ice cream from the modest vessel the family owned to make deliveries between Staten Island and Brooklyn—and to take him to deeper places off the coast for oceanic expeditions when he wasn’t of a mind to swim from our Seguine oyster beds—one hoary sailor shuffled down the steps from the street down to the dock. Dressed like the rest, in uniform dark suit, white shirt, and leather shoes, he boasted a low sitting sailor’s brimmed cap, double breasted woolen coat, and held a small, black pipe between his remaining teeth. His hair was white flecked with shades of grey, but when Grandfather saw his face, the man couldn’t have been older than 40. He walked with a heavy, dragging limp that was painful to watch. His eyes, mouth, and the
hunch of his shoulders revealed the look. He stumped along the narrow wharf, leaning on a twisted blackthorn Shillelagh. Reaching Grandfather, in a gesture of welcome and thanks he outstretched his hand palm outward—revealing scaly graying skin, and embraced Grandfather Fern, whispering gruffly:

  ‘Hail Dagon, dreamer and Father.

  Hail Cthulhu, sleeper and Priest.

  Hail Magna Mater.

  Death brings Birth. Life renews through Her.’

  “When he released Grandfather, he pressed into Grandfather’s own hand a bulging packet of paper, many times folded, faded, and roughly water-stained. It had been sealed in the old style, with a silver-grey sealing wax. The sigil was from the Esoteric Order from good old Innsmouth. Grandfather noticed the man’s ring, displaying the same sigil, was most likely what the sailor had used to seal the parcel. With a simple nod, the man retreated the same way he came. Grandfather finished supervising the ice cream delivery, but before leaving the grounds, when in the tunnels, Grandfather opened the paper packet while he stood at the bottom of a steep set of stairs leading to the basement beneath the sailor’s cafeteria—where the ice cream had been delivered. Grandfather was standing just beyond the stairs, inside a tunnel junction just beside a bare flickering electric bulb. When he told me the story years later, he would get very still and his voice very hushed.

  “He broke the seal to find first find a map of the grounds with a spidery handwriting annotating areas around what Grandfather learned was the run-down and soon-to-be-closed hospital. The top line read: ‘62 original —5 (deceased 4/27/29 and 5/2/29 post ECT; deceased 6/12/29 and 10/28/29 post surgery; deceased 11/11/29 post interrogation).’

  “For each of the 13 years that the men were kept in this unspeakable place, there were similar lines stating how many had died, the dates of death— some of which were followed with a question mark and the word ‘unverifiable’ beside it, and the manner of death— if that, too was verifiable. The least to die in a single year had been in 1937, only 1, with a cause listed as ‘undetermined sickness.’ But that was remedied with an unbelievable 9 being lost, mostly to interrogation and surgery, in 1941, three of whom died the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The final line, in red ink, read: ‘Four remaining.’