At first I thought it must be a branch, swept down here by the river. I had seen several. Yet as I looked at it, it moved, pushing down at the mud like an exposed arm, trying to thrust the rest of its body up out of the cloying muck.
Something groaned behind me but I could not bring myself to look back. I stumbled across the mud, veering away from the branch: how could it possibly be anything else?
The slipway was no more than forty yards away but I could see a finger of water sliding across the space between. Dark objects swirled in the water, but they could have been anything. I tried to run— now the sand did pull at me. Abruptly I trod on something soft and squishy and had to stifle a cry as I looked down and saw a face.
Aghast, I stared at the horror, drawing back my foot. But the moonlight showed me the truth: a jellyfish, large as a dinner plate, helplessly stranded. I struggled away from it, glancing towards the slipway.
Someone stood halfway down it. They were evidently watching me, too hidden in shadow to be clearly discerned. Convinced that something was trying to drag itself free of the sand, I got to the foot of the slope. As I went to mount it, the thin coating of weed on its stones defied me and I crashed to my knees. Gaping up, stupid as a fish, I could see the figure. It had moved on up the slipway, but still watched, as if waiting for me. Curiously, I felt a desire to reach it, as if it were vital for me to communicate with it.
I almost called for help, but knew I was being ridiculous. If the men in the pub could see me now, they would have snorted with laughter. Served me right for me being idiotic enough to wander out on to the mud flats.
It was difficult to get back on to the slipway, but I managed it and climbed slowly. By the time I was near the top, the figure had turned away, swallowed by the street above.
I was about to take a last scathing look at the mud banks, when something prevented me. I could hear the sea clearly, but there was something else now, a slithering sound of movement over the sand, from more than one direction. Angry with myself for not having the courage to look, I turned into the street. There was no one about: the village might have died. Then the figure emerged from a doorway a short distance ahead of me.
The moon was behind it, so it was cast like a shadow, though I could see that it wore a heavy coat that would have been more suitable for a storm, or an ocean crossing. The collar was turned up, covering the back of the figure’s head. It was the coat of a seaman. But why was the fellow waiting for me? I thought of the postcard. Could this be the sender? Then why the irritating mystery?
As I stepped forward, the figure moved on. It was clear that he wanted me to follow, but why the hell didn’t the man just approach me? There was no point trying to argue it out: the figure had moved too briskly.
Again I lost him, then discovered that he had turned up another street, even more narrow and confined than the one I was in. And he was waiting for me. Or was all this my imagination?
Was the figure trying to avoid me, justifiably disturbed by my ludicrous antics on the sands?
I entered the cobbled street. The houses were in darkness, the doors locked. Was everyone asleep?
Before I realised it, the figure had slipped into a door or an entry, infuriatingly out of sight. I swore under my breath, but followed, incapable of doing anything else. Stone steps led down into a darkness that was impenetrable. The smell that came up from below was unpleasant, as though it reached down to a weed-choked sea. This was where I needed a torch, I told myself. I took a step at a time, very slowly, convinced that I was an utter fool to be doing any of this.
Beyond the steps in the darkness I could hear the sea and a breeze suddenly caught me, shocking me with its strength, its coldness, as though it had come straight off the open ocean. I had gone down as far as I dared. I had to turn back.
The tantalising figure was above me, beyond the last step. I caught a glimpse of a face before it was gone, the face of an old man. A man, perhaps, who had known my father?
“Hey!” I shouted, the sound muffled by the confines of the walls. Quickly I went up to the street, but to my exasperation the man had gone. I ran down towards the wider avenue, coming into it in time to see the shape turning down another street some yards beyond me. I was about to race after him, determined to catch up with him, when something odd about my surroundings struck me. I didn’t recognise them. It wasn’t just a case of being in an unfamiliar place. These houses were not the same ones I’d seen a few minutes earlier. The cold breeze washed over me again and I had this bizarre idea of fractured time. Frantically I looked about me. These were simply not the same houses. Or for that matter, the same streets.
Where the hell was this place?
The figure must have the answer. He had—what, led me here? There would be an explanation, just as there was for the things I had stupidly imagined on the sands. This was the village, but just another street, surely?
There was a sign on one of the crumbling brick walls. FISH STREET. I hadn’t noticed it before, nor had I noticed the dark shape that rose up between leaning roofs and clustered chimneys: it was a steeple, yet one that looked as though the hand of God had chopped its top third away. I had seen a church from the road when I’d first arrived, though its tower had been intact.
A sudden disgusting stench blew in from the seaward side of the town, so powerful that I gagged, turning to see other figures shambling along the street. They seemed to be stooped, drunk perhaps, heads down. I felt a powerful desire not to be seen by them, so quickly moved on in the direction taken by the figure. Again I felt the acute need to find the man.
The side streets and alleys that ran off from this main thoroughfare were more unusual than I remembered. Decay had positively set in, many roofs collapsed, as if I had returned to the village twenty years on, with no repairs having been made to it in the interim. And it seemed far larger, not merely a village. Between two warehouses, neither of which I recalled, I glimpsed the sea.
The tide was almost full!
How could that be possible? It had been far out only minutes ago.
Voices drifted toward me from the rear—deep, guttural murmurings, distorted by the angled buildings. I felt cold: there was certain menace in the sounds.
Movement ahead made me jerk with shock. It was the figure. This time it waved to me. I was almost relieved. Other voices sounded from up the street. It must be the buildings which so distorted them. I was sure these people were converging on me.
The figure had entered a low corridor that led through a rotting gateway to one of the derelict cottages. There were no lights, no curtains. However, the smell of decay was even more powerful than that of the sea. Shadows hopped in the street behind me and moonlight gleamed on something jagged. There was evil purpose in that gathering.
I reached the doorway and went inside thankfully, closing the thick oak door, glad of its rusting bolt, which I slammed home. The figure waited before a worm-eaten table, the walls festooned with webs. This cottage had not seen proper use for decades. Moonlight seeped in through the smashed panes. Outside it had become as silent as a graveyard.
A match spat as the figure lit a candle. Our twin shadows danced for a moment. The face of the man was ancient, his skin like parchment, his eyes the eyes of the damned.
“You’re lookin’ fer Silas Waite.” It was a statement.
I nodded. I might have been standing before a corpse.
“I am he.”
Startled, I peered at the face. “You? You sent the card?”
“I’m yore father.”
It should have been an emotional, even sentimental jolt, that confrontation with this figure from the myths of my past, but I felt suddenly stupid, throat drying. How else could this old man know about the postcard?
“I’m Silas Waite. I came to fetch you, boy.”
There was no question of relief, no stirring of joy in me. I knew then that he could only be alien to me, as remote as my childhood. I could not even feel the clamminess of guilt. I chose words
clumsily. “Are you... hiding?” I thought of the clandestine chase, these grim surroundings.
“Not here. I didn’t want to be seen in my old place.”
“But you do live in Appledore?”
“I haven’t been back for many, many years.” He spoke with a thick accent and it was only now that I recognised it. It was American, almost Puritan.
“But you can’t live here, in this hovel?”
“This will be my last night here, thanks to you, boy. Tonight I go free. Out to—” But he stopped, listening to something beyond the door. He seemed satisfied that it had been nothing. “I’ve done my share of trawling. Now I can rest. Earned my keep, my passage.”
“Back to America?” I said hesitantly, not understanding.
The old man screwed up his face. “Back? You’re already here, boy. You’ve crossed. I brought you over. Like I promised them I would.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I was angry now, confused by this nonsense. The old man’s mind was wandering, lost on one of his many voyages. Why in God’s name had I come?
“Innsmouth. You’re in Innsmouth.”
I had never heard of the place. “Look, can’t we go and talk? I’m staying in a pub. We can—”
“I don’t have much time. They’ll come for me soon enough. I can hear the breakers on the Reef.” A look of extraordinary longing crossed his face as he said this. “It’s your term now.”
Had he said term, or turn? “My turn? To what?”
“You’re my son. You’ll take my place, as I took my father’s. And when it’s over for you, when you’ve trawled your share for them, you can go back. Bring your own offspring. They won’t let you swim out to Devil Reef until you’ve delivered him.”
I could make no sense of it at all. The poor fellow had completely lost his mind. Who looked after him? He couldn’t possibly live here on his own.
“They’ll be here soon. I’ll go now.” Again he smiled that appalling smile of longing.
“Who? Who’s coming?”
“Dagon’s children. They’ll instruct you.”
He didn’t, after all, know me. I could have been anyone. And yet, the postcard. How had he found me? Had someone else put him up to it?
“Who is Dagon?” I asked.
He shuddered, but not with the cold. It was with an almost lascivious delight. Then he began murmuring something so obscure, so twisted, that I must have stared at him dumbly. Was he about to have a fit? His eyes rolled and as his mouth opened, I saw that his tongue was forked.
A clear knock sounded on the door I had bolted. I realised then that I had not shaken off the pursuit after all. There were at least a dozen people out there. And it was me they had come for.
“Serve them well,” said Silas Waite. My father? It had become increasingly more unlikely. There could be no ties between us. I could not bring myself to bridge that frightful gap. He reached out for me, but I wanted to shout my rejection.
As he stepped towards me, moonlight daubed his hands and wrists. They were scaled.
I lurched forward, thrusting at his chest and he tumbled back, taken completely unawares by my sudden turn of mood. I could hear the door being pummelled. Frantically I rushed past the falling Waite; his claws dragged at my legs but I was beyond his reach and out through a door behind him.
I was in almost total darkness, blundering through another room. Vaguely I made out some stairs, which seemed the only escape from this suddenly nightmarish hovel. I dived upwards. Behind me there was a splintering of rotting wood, the shouts of whoever it was that gave chase. Like hounds scenting blood, the inhabitants of this vile place were unquestionably after mine. I heard Waite scream something, possibly a curse, invoking that name, Dagon. I recalled it partly. An ancient god?
The stairs cracked under me and for a moment I almost lost my footing as a section collapsed. Yet I clung on to the wormy banister and hauled myself upwards. Below me, shapes writhed, the smell from the ground floor unbelievable. I could hear water, as if the tide had suddenly sloshed in to the rooms there. They tried to follow me, but the stairs wouldn’t bear their weight: more of the wood ripped away.
Moonlight again guided me. I crossed a filthy room to a window that had long since rotted out. There was no glass. Fear moved me now. I would do anything to get away from these lunatics. God alone knew what was going on in this place.
I scrambled on to the windowsill, reaching up for the gutter outside. It was strong enough to enable me to drag myself up and on to the roof tiles. Carefully I wriggled across them until I was able to cling to the brickwork of the chimneystack. I swung my legs up over the apex of the roof, pausing to get my breath back. The view that greeted me as I looked out over the town—for town it was—almost made me loosen my grip.
This was not Appledore. What had he called this place? Innsmouth? I could make no logical sense of my being here. The tide was full and I saw its leaping waves reaching for the first of the quayside houses. Beyond them there were others, already submerged, only their roofs and fallen chimneys visible.
But worse, there was some kind of reef out in the bay, lit up by an unnatural fire. And by that weird light I could see swarms of—what, seals?—crawling all over it. Yet as I looked more carefully, I could see similar shapes flopping out of the sea on to the quay beyond. They were not seals. If they had once been human, they were no longer.
Slates shattered beside me as something burst up through the roof. I stared in horror, realising that a skylight had been flung open. It crashed down on the roof, ripped from its hinges and went sliding over the guttering, hitting the courtyard below. A head and shoulders appeared through the hole: it was Silas Waite. But he, too, was animated by something beyond human understanding. His terrible eyes gazed into mine, no more than a few feet away. I lifted my foot, preparing to drive my heel into his face.
Just as something, a shred of guilt, perhaps, stopped me, so a shadow crossed his face and for an instant I caught a glimpse of the man beneath, Waite as he must once have been. He seemed to struggle with his inner demon, to be what he was. At last I felt a stab of sympathy for him.
Below him there were sounds, deep croaks and Waite cried as if someone had struck him, urging him on with his grim work. Again his scaled flesh reached out for me.
“Go with them!” he shrieked. “They won’t release me until you have taken my place! I can’t go to the Reef. Don’t let them deny me. Not after all these years! Go with them!”
I pressed myself back against the chimneystack. Some of its bricks were loose, but I clung on. Other people had gathered in the street below us, but mercifully the shadows hid them completely. I could hear them slithering about as though the tide had reached even this far into the town.
“Why must you go to the reef?” I asked him.
He had been trying to get on to the roof, but could only squirm in the narrow vent, caught like a fish on a rock. “Dagon’s children are there. They’ll welcome me. I’ve trawled for them for all these years. I’ll be one of them at last. Don’t deny me. Your turn will come”
It made no sense. He could see I wanted to escape him and made an even greater effort to get on to the roof. I pulled a brick loose from the chimney and held it up as a weapon.
“I don’t know how you brought me here, but you’d better show me the way back.” I reached forward and gripped his wrist, pinning it to the slates. Again our eyes locked. It was all I could do to stare at him, at the torment I saw in his face.
He snarled, clawing at me with his free hand and I smashed at it with the brick. Yet he clung on tenaciously, immune, it seemed, to physical pain.
The voices below grew in volume, in excitement. I had been seen. They meant to capture me. I had to get clear of this place or God alone knew what these lunatics meant to do.
Waite began to sob, pleading with me to go with them, tears streaming down his face. It only served to anger me. I raised the brick again. “Take me back!” I shouted at him. “Take me ba
ck, or I’ll—”
It came to me as I released a torrent of the vilest abuse I could dredge up from my fury that it was not the monster I ranted at, not this insane old man, but the ghost of the man who had deserted me all those years ago, the father I had never known. His crime. The loneliness of boyhood, the frustration, the sorrow of my mother, these were the things that goaded me now, pouring a livid power into the hand that held the brick. I swung it for a killing blow.
He must have read murder in my face and perhaps, at last, understood why. His inhumanity dissolved for a moment: I saw only a bewildered old man, searching for images from his own past. His eyes fastened on my face.
“Son...” he murmured.
“We must get away from this place,” I told him, the brick quivering between us. “Do you hear me?”
My fury must have cowed the beast that drove him, at least for a while. Dumbly he nodded. “Help me up.”
A change had come over him, yet I didn’t trust his moods. But only he could show me the way back to Appledore, through whatever bizarre gate had brought us here.
Slowly I dragged him up on to the roof with me. Something tried to follow, but I beat it back, tossing the brick at it and others I had dislodged. Waite bent over, more beast than man, but there was for a moment no suggestion of treachery. I gripped his arm.
“Follow the roofs. Find a way down,” I told him.
Nodding, he began the dangerous climb across the slate landscape. I followed, turning now and then to try and see if we were followed, but the inhabitants of Innsmouth appeared to have chosen another route to attempt our capture. Waite muttered to himself and though I couldn’t hear the words, they were not the peculiar sounds he had been uttering earlier. He was like a man unable to recover fully from a bad dream. I forced myself to pity him, suppress the murderous instinct that had welled up so horribly in me.
The houses were tightly packed and we must have travelled a number of streets before we finally found our way cut off by too wide a gap between roofs. We would have to go down. I could hear nothing in the black street below. But as we dropped on to a lower roof, we had to cling to the shadows. Someone was moving beneath us.
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