Some time later the bulb extinguished as I had half-expected it to and plunged me into Stygian blackness. The darkness increased my sense of smell, it seemed, and I became aware of that strong fishy odour as though the fishermen of Innsmouth had piled their catch up in the street below and left it to decompose.
There were movements outside my door, stealthy steps that made a flopping sound. I tensed when I heard a key inserted in the lock; it rattled but the bolt held, and after a time the key was withdrawn. Now they were trying the other doors, giving up when they found the strong bolts obstructed their entry.
Voices uttered sounds that were neither words nor from human vocal chords, a whispered grunting that embodied their anger and frustration because I had denied them their prey. But surely wooden doors would not withstand a combined assault, sheer strength of numbers would overcome such paltry obstacles.
The stench was overpowering almost to the point of suffocation and I struggled to breathe. I recalled how Williamson had fled that night, run the gauntlet of these creatures of Dagon, but even at the height of my terror I dismissed the idea of bursting through one of the intersecting doors and leaping from a window on to the roof of an adjoining building. I pinned my hopes on my improvised fortifications, and if they succumbed to my enemy, then I accepted that I would face sacrifice in the black depths of that unfathomable abyss off Devil Reef.
I lay there rigid with fright, my fingernails gouging my palms until they bled, hearing the door weakening as those outside brought some kind of battering ram with which to split the stout woodwork. My senses swam. I attempted to scream but no sound came from my trembling lips. The darkness was becoming blacker by the second, now tinged with scarlet, as I hovered on the brink of merciful unconsciousness that would at least spare me the climax of this hideous trauma.
It was as I felt myself slipping gently into a state of blissful unawareness that I heard the door finally begin to yield.
***
The morning dawned with a dismal greyness, the fingers of daylight creeping in through the single window to stroke me into wakefulness. I sat up with a sense of disbelief, stared uncomprehendingly around me. The door was still bolted, the cumbersome dresser wedged firmly up against it. There was no sign of damage to the oaken panels.
I leaped from the bed, rushed to inspect the other two doors and discovered that neither bore any signs of damage. I was trembling violently. It appeared then that those nocturnal fiends had failed in their attempts to reach me just when it seemed that they had breached my crude defences.
Miraculously, I had survived the night hours unscathed and now, with luck, I might escape from Innsmouth and leave behind all the horrors which even the might of the armed forces had failed to destroy so many years ago.
With no small amount of trepidation I descended the stairs. There was no sign of the staring, sullen clerk, for which I was grateful. I walked out into the street and looked about me. There was not a soul in sight, just that faint marine odour which the morning breeze was beginning to dissipate.
I had no idea what time the bus departed for Arkham, but it would doubtless be hours before it arrived. Perhaps then, my best course was to begin walking along the road that led away from Innsmouth and when that battered conveyance eventually caught me up, I would board it.
I cared not for my dishevelled appearance, nor the fact that I was unwashed, my only desire to be away from here. I had purged myself of the curse handed down to me from Anna Tilton and my uncle. I had seen Innsmouth and survived the attempts of those who sought to drag me down into their hell of everlasting degradation. I would never be able to forget it but at least I was spared.
It was some time before I became aware that I had lost my way, possibly taken the wrong junction at the Green. For I seemed to be heading seawards, before me lay those flat salt marshes, intersected with wide and deep creeks, and that building at the mouth of the Manuxet was undoubtedly the infamous Marsh refinery.
I had to exert a conscious effort to turn around, almost as though the coast held me in a hypnotic grip, dragging my feet as though I had blundered into a sucking mire that was determined to hold me. Eventually, I managed it, forced myself to walk back the way I had come.
I tried to hurry but my efforts were slow, doubtless due to exhaustion after the terror of the past hours. But as I neared Innsmouth I found myself moving more easily. Whatever the effects of my proximity to the coast, I had shaken them off. Ahead of me was the road to Arkham and my step was quicker. I had made an error in my directions but, thankfully, I had rectified it.
By now the sun was up, its rays beginning to warm my chilled body and raise my spirits. It was only then that I recalled the disfiguration of my shadow on the previous day and instinctively I turned to check on it.
In that awful moment cold terror gripped me again and the faintness that had assailed me during the night returned. I stood aghast, searched the rough surface of the road around me, stared in rising panic, unable to understand.
For where previously the sun had cast a misshapen form on the ground, now there was nothing. I had no shadow.
THE CROSSING
by ADRIAN COLE
It is a common belief, particularly among Christians, that it is the Devil, and he alone, who preys on human souls, seeking to suborn or otherwise pervert them away from the light. A common belief, and a fallacy that makes the human soul so vulnerable to other forces that exist. Forces which trawl no less hungrily than Satan and his various minions and whose methods are no less insidious.
—Ludwig Kreigmann, The Hungry Stars
AMONG MY MAIL was an unexpected postcard. The lurid blue sky, unique only to such postcards, drew my eye. Beneath it clustered the houses of a fishing village that could have been one of dozens in the south-west of England, probably Cornwall. It was an area I had always meant to visit, but never had.
I flipped the card over, frowning. The writing was so badly penned that I couldn’t read a word of it. Yet it had been addressed clearly enough, albeit in archaic, printed letters. I sat at the kitchen table, glancing at the other bills and circulars before returning to the postcard. Again I tried to read the writing, but it continued to defy me.
Later, as I was rinsing the breakfast dishes, the village on the card suddenly brought to mind my odd awakening earlier that morning.
I could smell the sea. Probably that is putting it too simply, but my mind had made the jump as I had come out of sleep. If I had tried to analyse it more fully, I would have said it was a mixture of seaweed, fish and salt. Yet it had been very strong, as strong as it had been brief. Clearly an illusion. After all, I lived almost two hundred miles from the sea and couldn’t remember the last time I’d been anywhere near it. As a child, perhaps.
My mother used to take me to the seaside, though it had been more from a sense of duty than from sharing my enthusiasm. Like all little boys, I had imagined a trip to the sea as a promise of great adventure, crammed with every conceivable pleasure. It should have been a family event, but for me it had never been that.
I had never known my father. The man, a shadow never clearly focused for me by my mother, had left her when I was no more than a few months old. Ironically he had gone to sea, a wanderer by nature.
My mother had tried to hide her bitterness, but as I grew older, I understood that particular pained darkness better. She lived with another man, Bob, who had become my surrogate father and whom she loved possessively. They hadn’t made it easy for me to show my own genuine affection for Bob, although it was a better life; some of the gaps were filled, others were lost in the occasional silences of my mother, silences that Bob never sought to disturb.
I left the kitchen. In the living room I looked at the framed photograph of my son, David. The boy was nearly twenty now. He beamed from the picture, his arm around the shoulders of a blonde girl who was so obviously as happy as he was. They’d marry soon. There was no point in my telling them they were too young. What did I know about it? I g
rinned to myself. Like father, like son? There was an irony in that. My own marriage had not been a success. David’s mother was remarried now.
The split had been mercifully painless, not at all like I had heard divorces were supposed to be. Irene and I had remained friends and I actually liked Tony, the man she had since married. I had always been thankful that Tony had never made it hard for me where David was concerned. Tony was sensible enough never to try to come between David and his father. As a result he had won David over very quickly.
It should have made it all so simple, everyone being so considerate and understanding. But it had never been enough for me to see David at weekends, to go away with him for a week’s holiday, or to speak to him on the phone whenever I wanted to. I could not help feeling inadequate, cheated, though I never let them see it. Tony was no doubt astute enough to know it.
And now? David would be even less accessible soon. This would be the first year we had not gone away for a week together somewhere. But all kids outgrow holidays with their parents. I suppose I had been damn lucky that David had been amenable to it for so long. But he had his girl now, and skiing in the Alps. The boy had a bright future, undoubtedly a good degree and potentially a lucrative job in the city.
The prospect of a holiday without David was a grim one. And to spend it here, redecorating possibly, or building the porch I had been promising myself, held little appeal.
I realised I had brought the postcard with me into the room. Again I looked at it. The name of the little port was printed clearly on the back. Appledore, North Devon. I grunted with abrupt realisation. It was somewhere in that part of England where my father was believed to live, when he wasn’t at sea, although he would have retired long ago.
Once more I tried to read the awful scrawl. The signature was tiny, crabbed. It was hopeless, but within the message I was sure I could make out the word father. I shook my head. My mind had made the connection, fooling me.
I studied the picture of the village, its rows of fishing boats. Another world. Could my father really be hiding somewhere along that tiny quayside? How old would he be now? Seventy? More? Was the card perhaps the last effort of an old man to ask to be forgiven? I put it to one side, but even then I think I must have made the decision to follow it up.
***
As the coach wound along the road through the low dunes and beyond to the small sea front, I had my first sight of Appledore. On the far side of the wide estuary, tucked under the hills that came down to the water beyond, the fishing village looked as if it had been set on its very shore, more a part of the sea than the land. There were more dunes somewhere beyond the hills, the open sea behind them, but it was the houses that caught the eye: I could have been gazing back a hundred years or more. They had a changeless look to them, quaint and crowded, perched on the estuary’s edge. They must have been about a mile away across the broad river; the coach would have to travel up that river for another three miles before there was a bridge and a journey back downriver on the other side to the village.
Behind the hills, the sun had already started to drop; there was a hint of gold in the sky.
I’d booked a week here by the sea. Already I felt lonely without David. And this place, beautiful though it was, seemed so remote. I’d begun to wonder if the coach would ever get there.
There was a bridge at Bideford. Here I had to disembark and catch another, smaller bus to get to Appledore, but as it threaded the country roads, emerging at last on the quayside, I determined to enjoy my stay. The ghost of my errant father may or may not be here: I told myself it didn’t really matter.
As I found the guest house, I was aware of the village’s postcard tranquillity, the stark contrast with the environment I had left. For a moment it was an oddly disjointing calm.
In the distance, far across the ebbing grey tide of the estuary, I saw sunlight flash on a vehicle, my coach, perhaps, retreating to a more familiar world, abandoning me for my week.
As I had suspected, the boarding house turned out to be a pub, and after I had eaten my tea in a back room with a handful of other guests (two families on sightseeing holidays, bound for the North Cornwall coast) I went in to the public bar. I am not a tall man, but I had to duck down to avoid the low beams: I might have been in an old sailing galleon. The impression of looking into the past, even stepping into it, persisted. Yet it had become somehow reassuring.
There were a few men in the bar; I felt sure they were locals. They had the look of the sea about them, as if their deep-tanned faces belonged on sailing ships, shaped by salt and spray. I’d made a point of reading something about the North Devon coast and its shipping history. There’d been a good few sailing ships built here and Appledore itself had a real reputation for producing rugged men. “Barmen” they had been called, after the dangerous sandbars out in the estuary and wide bay beyond it.
A hundred years ago and more, they’d voyaged over to the New World, searching out the shoals of cod off New England, or fetching home cargoes of tobacco, their sailing vessels as seaworthy as any others. I’d see old photographs in the books, children sculling small rowing boats almost as soon as they could walk. If my father had been a seaman, I could understand why this place had been so magnetic.
I watched the men at the bar discreetly. They were enjoying a private joke, not ignoring me, but their manner suggested they would not be as approachable as the people I was used to. Even so, I had already made up my mind to ask a few questions about my father.
“Excuse me?”
One of the men, a thick-set fellow with a tangled beard and eyes that sparkled, as if he found me mildly amusing, nodded affably.
“I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find a man called Silas Waite? He lived in Appledore at one time.”
The bearded man continued to nod, turning to his companions. “Silas Waite,” he repeated in a rich burr. “Your father knew him, didn’t he, Dennis?”
The man he had addressed put down his empty glass. His hands were huge and callused; I imagined them hauling deep-sea nets. “I met ’im when I was a boy. Years ago.”
“Has he left?”
The man, Dennis, nodded. “He never settled here. Used to stop off, but never for more’n a few months. Father sailed with ’im. Good trawlerman, Silas Waite. Likely ended up in New England. More’n a few did.”
“When was the last time he was here? I’m sorry, I should have said, he was my father. I’ve been trying to trace him.”
The three men eyed me as if judging it strange that I should not know the whereabouts of my own father. None of them seemed to be able to answer my question.
“Did he have any other relations here, or close friends?”
But again they could offer little help. I was tempted to show them the postcard: it was tucked inside my jacket, though I felt no real encouragement to do so. Instead I thanked them, moving away to a table.
Others entered the pub throughout the evening and although a few nodded to me, none of them seemed ready to begin a casual conversation without being approached. I sipped my beer, thinking that tomorrow I would look into any local libraries I could find and see if I could trace an address. It was beginning to seem like a long shot and I started to feel foolish. I put it down to the long coach journey and decided on an early night.
Outside, the air was extremely still and moonlight washed the narrow streets vividly. The tiny houses crowded me, many of them unlit, though they were not shops but mostly cottages. I could hear the sea, in the middle distance, and as I passed the mouth of a slipway, I caught a strong smell of weed and salt, the precise smell I had thought I detected a few mornings ago when I’d woken up at home. A premonition, I grinned to myself.
The beer and my tiredness had combined with the strong sea air to make me light-headed and the gloom that had threatened me in the pub dissipated. There was no one about: I might have been the only person alive in the entire village. I walked down the ramp of the slipway, curious to see the sand a
nd its landscape by night.
It was treacherous underfoot: at high tide the sea slopped well up the stone ramp. I was careful not to fall. At the bottom there was a glistening expanse of muddy sand and rock, black in the moonlight. It humped up across the estuary, pools of trapped water gleaming between its mud banks. The tide had retreated a long way out, leaving the quay and walls of the village exposed, clumps of weed hanging from the stones below the high water mark. Small boats were scattered here and there on the mud, their buoys half-submerged.
I walked out on to the sand, testing it, relieved that it was not eager to suck me under; instead it was unexpectedly firm. The tide was so low that it looked almost possible to walk across the estuary to the village on its far shore, but I had no intention of being so foolhardy. Even so, I made my way carefully out on to the sands, aware that I had only the silent boats for company. I had never been in such an open space before, not even in a park.
The moonlight was surprisingly brilliant and north of where I stood, on the far shore where the tidal river turned for the open sea, huge banks of dunes rose up, amassed over the centuries by the powerful Atlantic tide. They formed a bizarre terrain, a desolate, microcosmic world.
My isolation began to make me uneasy. I imagined the tide racing in, trapping me. Turning, I looked back at the village, surprised that I had wandered quite so far across the mud flats. To my right, I heard an odd sound: gurgling, as if water swirled down into the sand. Listening, I was aware of other faint sounds beneath my feet, though I took them to be natural to this place.
As I began to retrace my steps, I felt sure something had shifted. I began to think this whole venture was foolish. Panic breathed close by me. My toe caught on an object under the sand and sent me sprawling. The mud stank of rotting fish; I rolled over to get my face away from its evil exhalations. As I lurched up, I saw something poking out of the mud some yards ahead of me.
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