“Sister,” I said, “you’re not my type.”
Her nostrils flared in anger and slits opened in her neck, flashing liverish red lines in her white skin.
Her gun was pointed at me, safety off. Her long nails were lacquered green.
I thought I could shoot her before she shot me. But I didn’t. Something about a naked woman, no matter how strange, prevents you from killing them. Her whole body was moving with the music. I’d been wrong. Despite everything, she was beautiful.
I put my gun down and waited for her to murder me. It never happened.
***
I don’t really know the order things worked out. But first there was lightning, then, an instant later, thunder.
Light filled the passageway, hurting my eyes. Then, a rumble of noise which grew in a crescendo. The chanting was drowned.
Through the thunder cut a screech. It was a baby’s cry. Franklin’s eyes were screwed up, and he was shrieking. I had a sense of the Cap’n drowning in the baby’s mind, his purchase on the purloined body relaxing as the child cried out.
The floor beneath me shook and buckled and I heard a great straining of abused metal. A belch of hot wind surrounded me. A hole appeared. Janice Marsh moved fast, and I think she fired her gun, but whether at me on purpose or at random in reflex I couldn’t say. Her body sliced towards me and I ducked.
There was another explosion, not of thunder, and thick smoke billowed through a rupture in the floor. I was on the floor, hugging the tilting deck. Franklin slid towards me and bumped, screaming, into my head. A half-ton of water fell on us and I knew the ship was breached. My guess was that the Japs had just saved my life with a torpedo. I was waist deep in saltwater. Janice Marsh darted away in a sinuous fish motion.
Then there were heavy bodies around me, pushing me against a bulkhead. In the darkness, I was scraped by something heavy, coldskinned and foul-smelling. There were barks and cries, some of which might have come from human throats.
Fires went out and hissed as the water rose. I had Franklin in my hands and tried to hold him above water. I remembered the peril of Jungle Jillian again and found my head floating against the hard ceiling.
The Cap’n cursed in vivid 18th century language, Franklin’s little body squirming in my grasp. A toothless mouth tried to get a biter’s grip on my chin but slipped off. My feet slid and I was off-balance, pulling the baby briefly underwater. I saw his startled eyes through a wobbling film. When I pulled him out again, the Cap’n was gone and Franklin was screaming on his own. Taking a double gulp of air, I plunged under the water and struggled towards the nearest door, a hand closed over the baby’s face to keep water out of his mouth and nose.
The Montecito was going down fast enough to suggest there were plenty of holes in it. I had to make it a priority to find one. I jammed my knee at a door and it flew open. I was poured, along with several hundred gallons of water, into a large room full of stored gambling equipment. Red and white chips floated like confetti.
I got my footing and waded towards a ladder. Something large reared out of the water and shambled at me, screeching like a seabird.
I didn’t get a good look at it. Which was a mercy. Heavy arms lashed me, flopping boneless against my face. With my free hand, I pushed back at the thing, fingers slipping against cold slime. Whatever it was was in a panic and squashed through the door.
There was another explosion and everything shook. Water splashed upwards and I fell over. I got upright and managed to get a one-handed grip on the ladder. Franklin was still struggling and bawling, which I took to be a good sign. Somewhere near, there was a lot of shouting.
I dragged us up rung by rung and slammed my head against a hatch. If it had been battened, I’d have smashed my skull and spilled my brains. It flipped upwards and a push of water from below shoved us through the hole like a ping-pong ball in a fountain.
The Monty was on fire and there were things in the water around it. I heard the drone of airplane engines and glimpsed nearby launches. Gunfire fought with the wind. It was a full-scale attack. I made it to the deckrail and saw a boat fifty feet away. Men in yellow slickers angled tommy guns down and sprayed the water with bullets.
The gunfire whipped up the sea into a foam. Kicking things died in the water. Someone brought up his gun and fired at me. I pushed myself aside, arching my body over Franklin as bullets spanged against the deck.
My borrowed taxi must have been dragged under by the bulk of the ship.
There were definitely lights in the sea. And the sky. Over the city, in the distance, I saw firecracker bursts. Something exploded a hundred yards away and a tower of water rose, bursting like a puffball. A depth charge.
The deck was angled down and water was creeping up at us. I held on to a rope webbing, wondering whether the gambling ship still had any lifeboats. Franklin spluttered and bawled.
A white body slid by, heading for the water. I instinctively grabbed at it. Hands took hold of me and I was looking into Janice Marsh’s face. Her eyes blinked, membranes coming round from the sides, and she kissed me again. Her long tongue probed my mouth like an eel, then withdrew. She stood up, one leg bent so she was still vertical on the sloping deck. She drew air into her lungs—if she had lungs—and expelled it through her gills with a musical cry. She was slim and white in the darkness, water running off her body. Someone fired in her direction and she dived into the waves, knifing through the surface and disappearing towards the submarine lights. Bullets rippled the spot where she’d gone under.
I let go of the ropes and kicked at the deck, pushing myself away from the sinking ship. I held Franklin above the water and splashed with my legs and elbows. The Monty was dragging a lot of things under with it, and I fought against the pull so I wouldn’t be one of them. My shoulders ached and my clothes got in the way, but I kicked against the current.
The ship went down screaming, a chorus of bending steel and dying creatures. I had to make for a launch and hope not to be shot. I was lucky. Someone got a polehook into my jacket and landed us like fish. I lay on the deck, water running out of my clothes, swallowing as much air as I could breathe.
I heard Franklin yelling. His lungs were still in working order.
Someone big in a voluminous slicker, a sou’wester tied to his head, knelt by me, and slapped me in the face.
“Peeper,” he said.
***
“They’re calling it the Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” Winthrop told me as he poured a mug of British tea. “Some time last night a panic started, and everyone in Bay City shot at the sky for hours.”
“The Japs?” I said, taking a mouthful of welcome hot liquid.
“In theory. Actually, I doubt it. It’ll be recorded as a fiasco, a lot of jumpy characters with guns. While it was all going on, we engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.”
He was still dressed up for an embassy ball and didn’t look as if he’d been on deck all evening. Geneviève Dieudonne wore a fisherman’s sweater and fatigue pants, her hair up in a scarf. She was looking at a lot of sounding equipment and noting down readings.
“You’re not fighting the Japs, are you?”
Winthrop pursed his lips. “An older war, my friend. We can’t be distracted. After last night’s action, our Deep Ones won’t poke their scaly noses out for a while. Now I can do something to lick Hitler.”
“What really happened?”
“There was something dangerous in the sea, under Mr. Brunette’s boat. We have destroyed it and routed the... uh, the hostile forces. They wanted the boat as a surface station. That’s why Mr. Brunette’s associates were eliminated.”
Geneviève gave a report in French, so fast that I couldn’t follow.
“Total destruction,” Winthrop explained, “a dreadful set-back for them. It’ll put them in their place for years. Forever would be too much to hope for, but a few years will help.”
I lay back on the bunk, feeling my wounds. Already choking on phlegm, I would be lucky
to escape pneumonia.
“And the little fellow is a decided dividend.”
Finlay glumly poked around, suggesting another dose of depth charges. He was cradling a mercifully sleep-struck Franklin, but didn’t look terribly maternal.
“He seems quite unaffected by it all.”
“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was...”
“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”
“He’ll be all right,” Geneviève put in.
I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.
“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”
Winthrop didn’t answer.
“Someone must know,” I said.
“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables’, never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”
The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfil his expectations.
“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”
On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else—the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship—would be swallowed up by the War.
All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.
FATHER DAGON
RETURN TO INNSMOUTH
by GUY N. SMITH
FOR TWO DECADES I have fought against the urge to return to Innsmouth. I say “return,” for although I have never been there I know that diabolical place as well as if I had been born there and lived with its horrors. In my frequent nightmares I have walked its deserted streets, hastened past the former Masonic Hall that is now the Esoteric Order of Dagon, smelled the nauseating fish odours that permeate the early 19th century buildings as a reminder that nothing has changed nor ever will.
My great-aunt, Miss Anna Tilton, who dedicated her life to the service of the Newburyport Public Library, wrote her own account of the happenings at Innsmouth, a hundred pages of handscript that came to me via the will of my uncle upon his death. Enclosed with the manuscript was the published account of one Williamson, together with newspaper clippings, dated 1928-29, of the Federal government’s attack on that seaport and the subsequent torpedoing of the Devil Reef just off the coastline. Crumbling, supposedly empty, houses were dynamited and many arrests were made although there were no public trials.
I tried to convince myself that those fish-like creatures that had spawned in the sea and inter-bred with the inhabitants of Innsmouth had been annihilated, that Dagon Hall had been blasted off the face of the Earth, that the evil had been destroyed forever. My research revealed nothing which would either deny or confirm my worst fears. Innsmouth was just another seaport at the mouth of the Manuxet, cut off from civilisation by its salt marshes with their maze of creeks; Arkham, Ipswich and Newburyport might as well have been a thousand miles away.
Truly, the matter should have been no business of mine. I had been born in New York and moved to New Jersey to take up a post in insurance. My life was routine, boring but safe. I had no cause to concern myself with the evil legends of Innsmouth. Far rather that my uncle had forgotten my existence than inflicted upon me those accursed documents which plagued me day and night with their accounts of unspeakable happenings, which most sane people would have dismissed as the ramblings of some amateur writer of weird fiction whose attempts to have her works published had resulted in failure. Such was her bitterness that in her dying hour her demented and senile brain had hit upon the idea of cursing her bloodline, afflicting them with her ramblings so that they would know no peace. It was her twisted way of ensuring that her pathetic attempts at literature would survive after her death.
Only I knew that Anna Tilton was no embittered failure, for Williamson had written commendably of her attempts to help him in his own ill-fated investigation of those awful events. I began wondering how much of Innsmouth still stood, if anybody still lived and fished there now; and if so, were their bodies misshapen, their skins scaly and their eyes unblinking?
The dreams increased with frightening regularity, escalated to terrifying proportions; I was trapped in Innsmouth, a human beast of the chase hounded through those dilapidated streets by hunting packs of amphibious creatures, grunting their lust for me so that they might sacrifice me to some vile deity deep in the watery hell of that abyss off Devil Reef.
It was in the spring that I finally conceded that I must return to Innsmouth. Unless I pandered to my fears, I would surely end my days in some asylum, screaming my terror aloud during the nocturnal hours when my cell became a room in the dreaded Gilman House, the shouts of my warders becoming the inarticulate cries of my subterranean pursuers as they sought to break through to me.
My long journey took me to Newburyport where I called at the public library and saw with my own eyes that tiara, where the beginning of my worst fears were confirmed. It existed. Behind the glass of its case, resting on purple velvet, it was identical in every detail to Miss Tilton’s, and Williamson’s, description. If only, on leaving that austere building, I had boarded the next train back to New Jersey, then at least I would have spent my declining years in the comparative safety of a mental hospital. Far rather insanity and nightmares than that which befell me as a result of my decision to carry on to Innsmouth.
It was whilst I stood in the sunlit street outside the library, awaiting the arrival of the bus that would take me on the last stage of my journey, that I chanced to glimpse my shadow on the sidewalk. At first I thought that possibly the distortion was caused by some overhead obstruction of the sun’s rays, the branches of a tree or the overhang of a building. But there was nothing that could in any way have impinged upon my own shadow, cause that elongation of the skull, the squatness of the figure and the stooping of the shoulders. In panic I crossed the road and consulted my reflection in the window of a shop; I was as I had always been, yet on glancing again at my shadow I perceived that it was still grotesque.
***
Suffice that I arrived in Innsmouth towards evening, my delay caused by the lateness of the bus and the seeming reluctance of its sullen driver to reach our destination. I was the only passenger, another fact that served to disconcert me. Was it still that nobody went to Innsmouth, that the town was shunned because of its history? Or because of its present?
Innsmouth was exactly as I knew it would be. Perhaps the dereliction had been increased by the dynamiting and the passing years since Anna Tilton described it. But, essentially, it was the same place.
Those 19th century brick and wooden edifices, crumbling, windows boarded up, deserted streets, not so much as a scavenging dog or cat in sight. With an hour or so of daylight remaining, I wandered down Lafayette Street, crossed over to Adams Street and stood there surveying the shoreward slums that lay to the east. I knew they were inhabited, even though I saw nobody, sensed that something lived amidst the sprawling degradation. Yet again I looked for my shadow but the sun had slipped below the western horizon.
I almost expected to encounter old Zadok Allen sitting by the fire station but most certainly he would be dead and gone, years ago. I glimpsed some figures in the distance, staring in my direction, but they hurried away at my approach. Before me lay the circular green, beyond it that pillared building on the junction which had been the Order of Dagon Hall. I found myself shying from it, fearful lest one of its doors might be
open and I should be afforded a glimpse of a priestly figure inside, wearing a tiara identical to that which rested in the glass showcase of the Newburyport Public Library. But its portals remained closed, for which I was greatly relieved.
The Gilman House was still standing, its lower windows lighted, the mullioned panes glinting evilly across the street. I hesitated. Would that there had been a means of transportation away from here before nightfall, but the bus had already departed for Arkham and the railway was disused. I accepted with a sense of trepidation that I was condemned to passing the night hours in Innsmouth.
The hotel clerk was how I expected to find him, a tall head on a short neck, his skin rough as though he suffered from eczema, his eyes staring unblinkingly at me. There was just one room vacant, he muttered as he consulted a register. I nodded and handed over three dollars.
The room itself had a familiarity about it as though I had stayed there before, the claustrophobic prison of my nightmares, and so aptly described by Williamson in his writings that it may well have been the very same one from which he had fled on that terrible night.
I knew that there would be no bolt on the door and that I would find one on the clothespress. It took me several minutes to transfer it to the door.
The north and south intersecting doors had bolts; I shot them firmly. I had not eaten but I preferred to endure the pangs of hunger rather than risk going outside in search of food. Fate had decreed that I come here; whatever the nocturnal hours had in store for me I must accept, for there was nothing that I could do to change the course of events. If I survived, and walked unscathed from here in the morning light, then I knew that I should have peace of mind for the rest of my life.
As an added precaution I pushed the heavy dresser up against the door. I could do no more in the way of self-preservation, so I lay on the bed fully clothed and tried to read by the dim light of the single bulb suspended over me. My concentration lapsed, the printed words became meaningless, and I found myself listening to the noises which came from down below.
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