I watched in stupefaction as a grotesque procession emerged from a side street, trudging towards the quay and the strange waters beyond it. There were several beings, I can only call them that, leading this procession. They were hunched over, almost hopping and although I could not see their eyes clearly, they looked uncommonly wide. Moonlight gleamed on flesh that seemed slick, oiled like the scales of a fish.
These beings were terrible enough, but even more disturbing were the people with them. For they were men and women, presumably of this wretched town, their heads bent in misery, their footsteps sluggish, almost drugged. Twenty or more of them were being herded along, making no attempt to break free. With a start I realised where I had seen a similar procession before.
On faded black and white film. The concentration camps. The victims being led to their grim destinations. These people below me were in just such a predicament.
I gripped Waite again and must have ground his thin bones. “Who are they?” Something he had said earlier came back to me. About trawling. For what, people?
“No more,” he whispered. “I have done enough. I have bought my place on Devil Reef.”
I could not believe the implications of what he was saying. Instead we watched the procession disappear. Silence followed it. So far our pursuers had not found us out.
“You could stay here. Then, in the end, bring your own son when it is time for you to come to the reef” he murmured.
David? Was he telling me I should serve in this horrific place, freeing myself by bringing David here?
He looked at me miserably, the agony of the years breaking him. “It’s the only way. If I am to be free. Would you abandon your father to their eternal revenge?”
I clutched at his collar, wrenching it, almost choking him. “You would buy your life with my son’s! You want me to act as you did? Betray him?”
I could see the real beast tearing at him. It had nothing to do with this nightmare town. He had nurtured it himself, until it had fastened into him, a remorseless parasite. But I had woken it, that merciless guilt and I could see it now, eating into his guts. And I needed its fire to keep him moving, guiding me back.
“Take me back” I whispered to it, using it cruelly. He had forced me to choose. How easy it was to be brutal.
Inside him, the beast squirmed. It heard me.
We dropped down to the street, winding our way through stinking alleys, ankle-deep in seawater. I recognised none of the places. If anything, they were older and more derelict than those I had seen already.
But eventually we came to a street marked Fish Street and I knew it.
As we stood at the mouth of the narrow passage that led off from it to the steps, Waite hung back. “I can’t return. Have pity”
“You can’t stay here—”
“If I go back” he croaked, “I’ll not last. I’m Dagon’s. The sea there will wash me back to face them. No matter how long it takes, it’ll deliver me to him, alive. You go. And keep away from the sea, boy. It won’t forget you”
There were voices coming towards us once more, converging on this street.
“They won’t follow,” he said. “Only you and I can cross. It’s how I was able to serve—” But he stopped, cutting short a confession I didn’t want to hear. He, too, had come to a decision and I realised then that he must, after all, have been my father. Otherwise, why would he have abandoned his mad plan to trap me there? Our blood had triumphed over his dark god. “I’ll keep them off long enough,” he added.
I paused, then ran up the alley, closing my mind to his final revelation. But in the end it tipped the balance against him. He had known I needed a last push. I fled down the steps into the darkness. Behind me I heard the terrible voices of the hunt and the solitary shout of the trawlerman.
And so I went back to my own world. To the fishing village of Appledore, where, for all those years, my father had netted his unwary catch, the human diet for the dark god of his choice.
DOWN TO THE BOOTS
by D.F. LEWIS
THE FEN STANK of fish. The moonlit puddles stretched as far as her eyes could see, as she shuffled ponderously from her shanty house at the sodden side of the sea-strained lands. For years, the waves had not returned to within sight of her leaning roofs and staircase chimneystacks, as if they had been mopped up by the persnickety under God who had more common ground with a housewife washing the public pavements outside her suburban semi than with Madge... she just stopped and stared, balding broom in her hand, surrendering her heart as well as her hearth to the sluggish entropy of Earth’s curds and separates...
Madge leaned on the broom handle, just listening to the distant irregular pulse of the sea. The lighthouse, one luminous speck far out amid the other floaters in her eyes, tried in vain to keep rhythm with the natural bloodbeat of the Earth... it failed mainly because the beacon’s stokers had gone home for their breakfast in far-off Innsmouth Town.
Furthermore, she could just discern the pitiful drone of tuneless foghorns, as if even further out on the plane of her memories there lurked the blackened hulks of her various husbands’ fishing steamers, long exhausted of fuel as well as catch. The fishes’ flapping tails had in fact ceased their futile puddle-stirrings, ever since the seas withdrew in much panic during the Great Storm of ’87: none of the fish had managed to stay the dreadful surge and were merely beached around Madge’s shanty, like so many suffocating slimy insects, with salt gill tears.
Tonight, the moon was full: it revealed the herring-bones’ clicking as nothing but the fitful wind amid their teetering attempts to become one giant skeleton memorial of the One Fish Soul. Madge could not fathom the foghorns’ relentlessness. They made no sense, except, perhaps, the fog drifting with the moving air across the sea proper, was probably due to arrive here any minute, allowing the wind then to blow off to other more seasonable commitments inland.
Her husbands were all dead, except hopefully the latest one. And he had trudged off through the puddles even earlier that night. So early, he’d not even bothered to go to bed. He did not want to miss the tide, as so many of his predecessors had done before finally catching it late in their lives... and the tide’s beginnings were at the end of beach upon beach of hardening ribbed mud. His boots, on first leaving the shanty, had made loud sucking noises, the deep treads reaching even beyond Madge’s drowsing ears, into a dream where she could not find the ability to follow. Life’s pull was stronger. Waking was the magnetic north, draining her blood in sporadic spurts towards the poles of her death.
None of them come back. It was tantamount to a ritual, a delayed menstrual sacrificer which seemed as pointless as it was selfdestructive. Fishing, though, was in her husbands’ essence, more in the nature of hooking mouthless cancers from the swamp in the belly than God’s critters from the draining creeks of the sea lands.
As she stood at the shanty door, she managed to imagine the propeller-choked steamers upon the craters of churning brine that could still bear their floating hulks: the fly-rods spinning webs from deckrail to deckrail into a vast tangled cat’s cradle game she and her sister often fell out over in the olden days: the trailing nets flapping in their wake like so much living weed: the monsters deep down at the bottom of the involuted chimney-cores of dead volcanoes, their serrated backfins carving as far up as possible, in foolhardy attempts to return to the universe, to that huge space above the sky where they’d been created out of nothing but the mind-power of the master creature who stood above even God in the hierarchy of dreams...
Yes, they were nothing but dreams, Madge insisted. She stomped her foot, but lost it in the process beneath the mulch.
Then she saw them: her husband’s thigh boots stood out from the fen like the blackened stumps of Earth’s teeth, ill-pulled by a dentist God, Himself with a grin of decaying vampire fangs, each of these two death prongs liable to hurt Him more than his victim...
She shook herself. Dreaming again. They could not be his boots. But, if not, what
were they?
That previous night, they’d spoken, perhaps for the last time. “Don’t forget to take your lunchbox, Owen... and your leggings are hanging up by the latchdoor.”
“I don’t want the leggings. The boots are quite enough—reaching to the crotch as they do.”
“But your most li-able parts will then be open to the soakings...”
“Did I ever tell you of my father? He said don’t be caught dead in your leggings, son, for people’ll think you were a nancy-boy...”
“What rubbish!” She bit her tongue.
“No, there’s something to that. There’s not enough time to be a belt-and-braces man. Life’s too thin for moithering...”
Unaccountably, tears had filled his eyes. But then she put it down to remembering his dad. Perhaps he’d left his own wife, in similar circumstances, to go fishing. There seemed no point in such an occupation, when the fishers themselves never came back... nor the fish with them. Only the stale bread would ever have to suffice, with no bony slimy innards to make two slices palatable enough.
She’d kissed him on the salt-stained lips for the first time, before retiring for the night, knowing he would sit up until it was time to go. How could anyone sit and do nothing? Her own thoughts were not sufficient to keep her going, without her hands doing something, like tatting, fishbone knitting, or baking stale bread: like making a start on the growing housework: but even such chores which seemed to multiply even as she slaved over them, could not staunch the fevering of her brain: she needed more: there was no rest inside her: she’d rather be dead than idle.
The dawn was slowly slipping up the side of the sky like a creamy yellow sea with clouds for waves. The moon had nowhere to hide, the land being flattened to the end of sight. Only the two tall boots stood up like sentries, betokening Owen’d become a ghost even before he’d left the catchment area of the shanty and before he got to the edge of the so-called sea: where his craft would still be bobbing at anchor, or beached upon the frozen ripples of the mud...
His leatherskin jacket-top smacks were lying beside the boots like a dead monster’s hide, its inner body gutted like a fish and gambolling off somewhere to fright another new widow with its kinship to a giant insect.
She whispered to her widowmaker’s ghost, in case it could hear: “I told you to take your leggings.” But that did not seem to make much sense: so she took the stubbled broom and proceeded to sweep up the endless puddles, as best she could in the circumstances.
THE CHURCH IN HIGH STREET
by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
...the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the inhabitants thereof...
—Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon
IF I HAD not been a victim of circumstances, I would never have gone to ancient Temphill. But I had very little money in those days, and when I recalled the invitation of a friend who lived in Temphill to become his secretary, I began to hope that this post—open some months before—might still be available. I knew that my friend would not easily find someone to stay with him long; not many would relish a stay in such a place of ill repute as Temphill.
Thinking thus, I gathered into a trunk what few belongings I had, loaded it into a small sports car which I had borrowed from another friend gone on a sea voyage, and drove out of London at an hour too early for the clamorous traffic of the city to have risen, away from the cell-like room where I had stayed in a tottering, blackened backstreet house.
I had heard much from my friend, Albert Young, about Temphill and the customs of that decaying Cotswold town where he had lived for months during his research into incredibly superstitious beliefs for a chapter in his forthcoming book on witchcraft and witchcraft lore. Not being superstitious myself, I was curious at the way in which apparently sane people seemed to avoid entering Temphill whenever possible—as reported by Young—not so much because they disliked the route, as because they were disturbed by the strange tales which constantly filtered out of the region.
Perhaps because I had been dwelling upon these tales, the country seemed to grow disquieting as I neared my destination. Instead of the gently undulating Cotswold hills, with villages and half-timbered thatched houses, the area was one of grim, brooding plains, sparsely habited, where the only vegetation was a grey, diseased grass and an infrequent bloated oak. A few places filled me with a strong unease— the path the road took beside a sluggish stream, for instance, where the reflection of the passing vehicle was oddly distorted by the green, scum-covered water; the diversion which forced me to take a route straight through the middle of a marsh, where trees closed overhead so that the ooze all around me could barely be seen; and the densely wooded hillside which rose almost vertically above the road at one point, with trees reaching toward the road like myriad gnarled hands, all wearing the aspect of a primeval forest.
Young had written often of certain things he had learned from reading in various antique volumes; he wrote of “a forgotten cycle of superstitious lore which would have been better unknown”; he mentioned strange and alien names, and toward the last of his letters—which had ceased to come some weeks before—he had hinted of actual worship of trans-spatial beings still practised in such towns as Camside, Brichester, Severnford, Goatswood and Temphill. In his very last letter he had written of a temple of “Yog-Sothoth” which existed conterminously with an actual church in Temphill where monstrous rituals had been performed. This eldritch temple had been, it was thought, the origin of the town’s name—a corruption of the original “Temple Hill”—which had been built around the hill-set church, where “gates,” if opened by now long-forgotten alien incantations, would gape to let elder demons pass from other spheres. There was a particularly hideous legend, he wrote, concerning the errand on which these demons came, but he forebore to recount this, at least until he had visited the alien temple’s Earthly location.
On my entrance into the first of Temphill’s archaic streets, I began to feel qualms about my impulsive action. If Young had meanwhile found a secretary, I would find it difficult, in my indigence, to return to London. I had hardly enough funds to find lodging here, and the hotel repelled me the moment I saw it in passing—with its leaning porch, the peeling bricks of the walls, and the decayed old men who stood in front of the porch and seemed to stare mindlessly at something beyond me as I drove by. The other sections of the town were not reassuring, either, particularly the steps which rose between green ruins of brick walls to the black steeple of a church among pallid gravestones.
The worst part of Temphill, however, seemed to be the south end. On Wood Street, which entered the town on the north-west side, and on Manor Street, where the forested hillside on the left of the first street ended, the houses were square stone buildings in fairly good repair; but around the blackened hotel at the centre of Temphill, the buildings were often greatly dilapidated, and the roof of one three-storey building—the lower floor of which was used as a shop, with a sign—POOLE’S GENERAL STORE—in the mud-spattered windows— had completely collapsed. Across the bridge beyond the central Market Square lay Cloth Street, and beyond the tall, uninhabited buildings of Wool Place at the end of it could be found South Street, where Young lived in a three-storey house which he had bought cheaply and been able to renovate.
The state of the buildings across the skeletal river bridge was even more disturbing than that of those on the north side. Bridge Lane’s grey warehouses soon gave way to gabled dwellings, often with broken windows and patchily unpainted fronts, but still inhabited. Here scattered unkempt children stared resignedly from dusty front steps or played in pools of orange mud on a patch of waste ground, while the older tenants sat in twilit rooms, and the atmosphere of the place depressed me as might a shade-inhabited city ruin.
I entered into South Street between two gabled three-storey houses. Number 11, Young’s house, was at the far end of the street. The sight of it, however, filled me with forebodings—for it was
shuttered, and the door stood open, laced with cobwebs. I drove the car up the driveway at the side and got out. I crossed the grey, fungus-overgrown lawn and went up the steps. The door swung inward at my touch, opening upon a dimly-lit hall. My knocks and calls brought no answer, and I stood for a few moments undecided, hesitant to enter. There was a total absence of footprints anywhere on the dusty floor of the hall. Remembering that Young had written about conversations he had had with the owner of Number 8, across the road, I decided to apply to him for information about my friend.
I crossed the street to Number 8 and knocked on the door. It was opened almost immediately, though in such silence as to startle me. The owner of Number 8 was a tall man with white hair and luminously dark eyes. He wore a frayed tweed suit. But his most startling attribute was a singular air of antiquity, giving him the impression of having been left behind by some past age. He looked very much like my friend’s description of the pedantic John Clothier, a man possessed of an extraordinary amount of ancient knowledge.
When I introduced myself and told him that I was looking for Albert Young, he paled and was briefly hesitant before inviting me to enter his house, muttering that he knew where Albert Young had gone, but that I probably wouldn’t believe him. He led me down a dark hall into a large room lit only by an oil lamp in one corner. There he motioned me to a chair beside the fireplace. He got out his pipe, lit it, and sat down opposite me, beginning to talk with an abrupt rush.
“I took an oath to say nothing about this to anyone,” he said. “That’s why I could only warn Young to leave and keep away from— that place. He wouldn’t listen—and you won’t find him now. Don’t look so—it’s the truth! I’ll have to tell you more than I told him, or you’ll try to find him and find—something else. God knows what will happen to me now—once you’ve joined Them, you must never speak of their place to any outsider. But I can’t see another go the way Young went. I should let you go there—according to the oath—but They’ll take me sooner or later, anyway. You get away before it’s too late. Do you know the church in High Street?”
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