“They don’t,” I told her. “Not into the biology. I never really thought they did. They’re a psychological thing. There’s no psychotropic protein involved here. What we’re talking about is a slight failure of the switching mechanism which determines physical structure. Ann, the nightmares come from the same place as the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Zadok Allen’s fantasies—they’re a response to fear and anxiety and shame. They’re infectious in exactly the same way that rumours are infectious—people hear them, and reproduce them. People who have the look know that the dreams come with it, and knowing it is sufficient to make sure that they do. That’s why they can’t describe them properly. Even people who don’t have the look, but fear that they might develop it, or feel that for some eccentric reason they ought to have it, can give themselves nightmares.”
She read the criticism in my words, which said that I had always been right and she had always been wrong, and that she had had no good cause for rejecting my proposal. “You’re saying that my dreams are purely imaginary?” she said, resentfully. People always are resentful about such things, even when the news is good, and despite the fact that it isn’t their fault at all.
“You don’t have the inversion, Ann. That’s quite certain now that I’ve found the genes and checked out all the sample traces. You’re not even heterozygous. There’s no possibility of your ever developing the look, and there’s no reason at all why you have to avoid getting married.”
She looked me in the eye, as disconcertingly as Gideon Sargent ever had, though her eyes were perfectly normal, and as grey as the sea.
“You’ve never seen a shoggoth,” she said, in a tone profound with despair. “I have—even though I don’t have the words to describe it.”
She didn’t ask me whether I was renewing my proposal—maybe because she already knew the answer, or maybe because she hadn’t changed her own mind at all. We walked on for a bit, beside that dull and sluggish river, looking at the derelict landscape. It was like the set for some schlocky horror movie.
“Ann,” I said, eventually, “you do believe me, don’t you? There really isn’t a psychotropic element in the Innsmouth syndrome.”
“Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”
“Because,” I went on, “I don’t like to see you wasting your life away in a place like this. I don’t like to think of you, lonely in self-imposed exile, like those poor lookers who shut themselves away because they couldn’t face the world—or who were locked up by mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters or sons and daughters who couldn’t understand what was wrong, and whose heads were filled with stories of Obed Marsh’s dealings with the Devil and the mysteries of Dagon.
“That’s the real nightmare, don’t you see—not the horrid dreams and the daft rites conducted in the old Masonic Hall, but all the lives which have been ruined by superstition and terror and shame. Don’t be part of that nightmare, Ann; whatever you do, don’t give in to that. Gideon Sargent didn’t give in—and he told me once, though I didn’t quite understand at the time, that it was up to me to make sure that you wouldn’t, either.”
“But they got him in the end, didn’t they?” she said. “The Deep Ones got him in the end.”
“He was killed in an accident at sea,” I told her, sternly. “You know that. Please don’t melodramatise, when you know you don’t believe it. You must understand, Ann—the real horrors aren’t in your dreams, they’re in what you might let your dreams do to you.”
“I know,” she said, softly. “I do understand.”
I understood too, after a fashion. Her original letter to me had been a cry for help, though neither of us knew it at the time—but in the end, she’d been unable to accept the help which was offered, or trust the scientific interpretation which had been found. At the cognitive level, she understood—but the dreams, self-inflicted or not, were simply too powerful to be dismissed by knowledge.
And that, I thought, was yet another real horror: that the truth, even when discovered and revealed, might not be enough to save us from our vilest superstitions.
***
I didn’t have any occasion to go back to Innsmouth for some time, and several months slipped past before I had a reason sufficient to make me phone. The desk-clerk at the hotel was surprised that I hadn’t heard—as if what was known to Innsmouthers ought automatically to be known to everyone else on Earth.
Ann was dead.
She had drowned in the deep water off Devil Reef. Her body had never been recovered.
I didn’t get any sort of prize for the Innsmouth project, and despite its interesting theoretical implications it wasn’t quite the reputation-maker I’d hoped it would be. As things turned out, it was only worth a paper after all.
THE HOMECOMING
by NICHOLAS ROYLE
BELGRADE’S DANUBE RAILWAY station was cold and dark, its staff unhelpful. Daniela had to suppress a desire to turn back and return to her little room off Yuri Gagarin Boulevard. But she had taken the decision and there was no going back on it.
Belgrade had been comfortable—the standard of living far higher than anywhere in Romania—but never quite home. Her grasp of Serbo-Croat just about allowed her to order a beer and buy a bus ticket. It was with the help of other Romanian exiles that she had been able to find a room and furnish it with a large sofa and an old TV.
When reports of the Timisoara massacre first leaked out of Romania she stayed indoors round the clock waiting for further news. She was watching bleary-eyed from lack of sleep when the crowds massed in central Bucharest ostensibly to demonstrate support for President Ceausescu. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The Berlin Wall had crumbled and the Czech communists had been ousted only weeks before. And the Romanians were going to let the Ceausescu regime get away with the slaying of thousands of people in Timisoara, not to mention the subjugation of the entire country for the last twenty-four years.
The people in the square waved their banners and listened while Ceausescu droned from his balcony. Then the unthinkable appeared to be happening. Daniela tensed on her sofa, hardly daring to breathe in case she missed anything. Parts of the crowd had thrown down their banners and begun to berate their president. More joined in and Ceausescu became confused. He believed the people loved him because his sycophants assured him of it daily. He began a chopping, sweeping motion with his arm as if he wanted to brush the troublemakers aside or erase them like an error committed in haste.
That night, troops from the ranks of the Securitate—the hated secret police—reacted with force. Dozens died but the spirit of the people was not broken. At eleven the next morning state television reported that the defence minister was a traitor and had committed suicide. The crowd sensed it as a turning point and attacked the central committee building.
Daniela was crouching on the floor, her mouth alternately dry and filling up with the juices of fear and excitement. Her whole body vibrated like a tightly coiled spring.
Ceausescu was still in the building when the revolutionaries gained access and began to rampage through it. The TV pictures showed him taking off in a helicopter at the same time as the revolutionaries swarmed on to the roof.
Daniela spat at the screen, pleaded with God to let the helicopter crash.
She watched the feared Securitate fight their desperate counterrevolution and was still watching on Christmas Day when the Ceausescus were shown lying dead on the ground after their summary trial and execution by firing squad.
She sat so close her nose touched the screen. There he was, the Conducator, the President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Grand Leader of the Peoples of Romania, the despot who had bled the country dry with his insane obsession to pay off all foreign debt, so that his people queued for bread at 5:00 a.m. and considered chicken’s feet a feast. The paranoid tyrant, who had his toilet seat scrubbed with alcohol before and after use and sent anyone making a joke about him to jail for two years, lay in the dirt, his collar tightly fastened, his grey old
face puffy, his eyes closed forever.
She clasped the television set to her and rolled on to her back.
Two months later in Belgrade-Danube railway station she was thinking of reneging on her decision to go back home to Romania. No, she couldn’t. She climbed on board the train. The guard wanted her to pay in US dollars for a sleeper. She offered him ten. He shook his head.
“How much?” she asked him.
“Thirty,” he muttered sourly.
It was Daniela’s turn to shake her head. “No way,” she snorted and stalked off to find a seat. The problem with Romanian Railways was that you acquired a seat reservation at the same time as you bought your ticket. But only if your journey started inside Romania. She couldn’t reserve a seat in Belgrade. When they crossed into Romania people would board the train at Timisoara with reservations for unmarked seats and Daniela could find herself with nowhere to sit. But she wasn’t paying $30 for a sleeper. It was a disgrace and hardly in the spirit of the revolution.
The train rolled through northern Serbia, through the province of Vojvodina, and Daniela grew bored of the unchanging scenery. She felt tense and nervous about returning to Romania.
Several weeks had passed since the revolution. The counterrevolution had been put down inside a week, after which time Securitate agents were smoked out of the ruins and either killed or sent for trial. So she had nothing to fear. On the contrary: she was excited to be going back. But excitement always smelled a little like fear.
The motion of the train lulled her to sleep.
She dreamed pictures from the revolution. They were things she’d seen on television but now without the protection of the screen. Tanks rumbled through the streets of Bucharest belching exhaust fumes and shelling buildings indiscriminately. Automatic fire scored deep scratches in the plaster finishes of rundown apartment buildings. The muzzle of a gun appeared at a window, followed by a face and immediately a burst of fire directed at the street. A soldier fired back from behind the tank. He hit his target and the man fell back into the room while his gun toppled to the street. The tank’s gun turret swivelled thirty degrees and shelled the building. Masonry and glass shattered like toys and flames blew out of several blackened windows. The gun twisted farther round and shelled the next building, and the next.
It was a kind of purging process, she realised dimly. An exorcism by mortar and fire of the city’s evil presence.
She woke up worrying about the tunnels. Apparently a secret network of tunnels existed underneath Bucharest accessible only to the Securitate. But with terrified agents scampering like rabbits for cover, the hiding places could not have remained inviolable.
She fell asleep again. Border guards woke her. They impinged on her exhausted senses as uniformed automata. Sleep took her once more. At Timisoara there was a mighty scuffling and shambling of feet and bodies as denizens of the persecuted town crammed on to the train. “Reservat! Reservat” they protested in a flat, toneless whine, but she snored louder and they died away.
Bucharest was still several hours distant. Daniela slid in and out of sleep as if it were a bath full of tepid, scummy water. She confused glimpses of the forlorn compartment and its huddled occupants with snatches of dreams. At one point she jumped when she thought she saw Ceausescu and his wicked wife slumped in the opposite seats, their faces puffed up and pockmarked by sooty bullet wounds, their jaws collapsed.
At some indeterminate stage in her dreams, Daniela became aware of natural light. Early-morning light the colour of dishwater was smeared across the window, streaked by thicker cloud as if applied unevenly with a cloth. Two of her fellow passengers were already awake: a stubble-faced old man stuffed into a shabby trilby, and a sallow boy no more than eighteen or nineteen. Their complexions reflected the mood of the morning and none of the revolutionary zeal she had expected.
Once she had woken up there was no going back to sleep. For one thing the dreams were too disturbing. She peered through the grimy glass hoping to see some feature of the presumed landscape loom out of the fog. But nothing emerged. The longer she stared the more she became dissociated from reality. Maybe Romania had vanished, replaced by this almost sea-like fog. She half expected to glimpse the flick of a fish’s tail or to meet the mournful gaze of some fantastic creature of the deep.
She must have drifted back to sleep because all of a sudden she was looking out of the window at the outskirts of Bucharest. The fog had lifted but still hung above the rooftops, below the sky; more a mist now than a fog, but one polluted by soot and grit.
The train passed over a level crossing and Daniela caught sight of figures loitering at various points down a dusty street. One of the Dacias parked in a long row beneath the skeletal trees was a charred wreck. She supposed there would be the odd one or two scattered about.
But the train rattled on deeper into the city. She’d only been away a year and in that time things had changed. In the last decade most of the city’s old buildings, churches first and foremost, had come under threat of demolition. It was no idle threat. The train passed a section of waste ground peppered with weeds that Daniela realised with a pang had been the site of one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches.
With a jolt from the locomotive as it braked round the last curve, the line of dirty green carriages visible ahead through the window see-sawed into the Gara de Nord.
***
The station was the same as she remembered it. As ugly as sin itself. Eager for impressions she walked out into the streets. They smelled the same as they had before, of spoilt and rotten fruit. Since fresh fruit had rarely been freely available in Bucharest, Daniela had always believed the drains to be responsible. It depressed her that the revolution had not left its own scent on the city. She looked for signs of the fighting she’d watched on the television news. There were potholes in the middle of the road, but there always had been. The people she passed looked much as they had done before: unhealthy, paranoid, defeated. There was none of the joy of liberation in their eyes, no spark of defiance. The burden appeared not to have been lifted from them.
She wandered bewildered away from the railway station and its satellite cheap hotels and prostitutes. One street crossed another and turned into a new one. But they all looked the same. She passed a lot of broken and boarded-up windows. Doors were tightly locked and where shutters protected windows still further, they were snapped shut.
When she stopped walking she fancied she could hear movement behind the sightless windows and obstructed doorways. But the susurrant nature of the noise she heard put her more in mind, once more, of the city’s drains.
On the corner was a dingy grocery store. She peered inside but could make nothing out of the huge shadows and shafts of dusty reflected light. Behind her the street whispered and she felt unaccountably anxious. She looked around. Three young children stood over a mound of fur on the opposite corner. Daniela looked closer and saw that the animal was a dog. Fixed in a rictus, its jaw was caked with blood and its legs stuck out stiffly. The children stared at Daniela with wide but uncurious eyes. One of them kicked the dog’s belly with a bare foot. The dead animal scraped against the gritty pavement. Daniela hurried into the grocery store.
She became instantly lost in a maze of shelves. They held nothing but dust so thick it looked like stacks of dead mice. She turned into a dead end and frightened a spider. As big as a bunch of keys it clattered on to the floor and scuttled under the bottom shelf.
Sweat began to run in the dust on her forehead and her breathing became tight. She whirled around looking for the exit. An aisle looked promising, but when she turned the comrner she found herself by the counter. She would have fled but a man materialised from shadows which hung like curtains and twitched.
“What do you want?” he asked her in a friendly voice. She wondered if it might be a trap.
“The shelves are empty,” she whispered hoarsely.
He pointed to a selection of pickles and preserves in jars on a shelf behind the c
ounter. He explained that stocks were low. His manner seemed not unfriendly and Daniela felt that if she couldn’t trust him she couldn’t trust anyone in this godforsaken city.
“I’ve been away,” she said. “I saw everything on television. And now it looks the same as before.”
The man shrugged his shoulders beneath his grubby shopcoat.
“Why are people still afraid?” she demanded crossly. “The Securitate are finished, aren’t they?”
At this the man’s brows knitted and he raised a yellowed finger to his lips. They parted to release a sound which reminded her of the boarded-up windows. She noticed that the man’s finger also seemed to be pointing at the wall above his head. When she squinted through the gloom she recognised beneath trails of dusty cobwebs a photograph frame.
Daniela turned and ran. She couldn’t deny that the frame had enclosed the shiny button eyes and hamster cheeks of the executed dictator. Why hadn’t the photograph been destroyed? She collided with a shelf and coughed and spluttered when the dust flew in her face like a cloud of flies.
She was relieved to reach the door but distressed to see the three children across the street knelt down around the dog, plunging their large bony hands into its split carcass.
Weakened by her experience in the shop, Daniela felt unable to intrude on the depravity. She turned her back and at the next junction headed down the street that looked least threatening. There were still shuttered windows and patches of broken glass in the road but she began to feel reassured by certain signs. There were more shops and queues of people emerging from their doors. At an intersection she turned down a major boulevard towards the city centre.
Here the scars of civil war were plentiful. Burned-out and overturned cars, entire tenement blocks destroyed by fire, craters in the road. Only the Intercontinental Hotel appeared untouched, where foreign journalists and newsmen would no doubt have stayed. Daniela drifted into a couple of stores. The photographs of Ceausescu had been taken down and left bleached rectangles on the wall. There was little to buy apart from the ubiquitous jars of pickled fruit and slabs of sweaty cheese.
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