As I sat there, slumped over, I realised that I was feeling even worse. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so bad, or even what exactly the problem was. It reminded me of a time when I’d had food poisoning after a dodgy seafood pizza. A few hours after the meal I’d started feeling... well, just odd, really, in a way I found difficult to define. I didn’t feel particularly ill, just completely disconnected and altogether strange. I now felt roughly similar, though as if I’d drunk all the wine in the world and taken acid as well. The room seemed composed of dark wedges of colour which had no relation to objects or spaces, and if asked to describe it I wouldn’t have known where to start.
Suddenly remembering that Susan was throwing up in the toilet I jerked my head up, wondering again if I should go to her aid, and then I passed out.
Susan’s skin was warm and almost sweaty. We rolled and I felt myself inside her, with no idea of how I’d got there. I have images of the side of her chin, of one of her hands and of her hair falling over my face: but no memory of her eyes.
I think I felt wetness on my cheek at one point, as if she cried again, but all I really remember is the heat, the darkness, and not really being there at all.
***
The first thing I did when I woke was to moan weakly. I was lying on my side facing the window, and a weak ray of sun was shining on my head. My brain felt as if it had been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, and the last thing I needed was light. I wanted very much to turn away from it, but simply didn’t have what it took. So I moaned instead.
After a few minutes I slowly rolled over onto my back, and immediately noticed that Susan wasn’t beside me. I had a dim memory of her eventually coming to bed the night before, and so assumed that she must have woken first and be taking a shower. I rolled back over onto my side and reached pitifully out towards the little table by the bed. My cigarettes weren’t there, which was odd. I always have a cigarette last thing before going to sleep. Except last night, by the look of it.
Suddenly slightly more awake, I levered myself into a sitting position. What had I done before going to bed? I couldn’t really remember. My coat was lying in a tangle on the floor, and I experienced a sudden flashback of thrashing my way out of it. Reaching down I found my cigarettes and lighter in the pocket and distractedly lit up. As I squinted painfully around the room I noticed something out of place.
Susan’s washing bag was on the chair by the window.
Looking back, I knew from that moment something was wrong. I went through the motions in the right order and with only gradually increasing speed, but I knew right at that moment.
Susan’s washing bag was still here in the room. She hadn’t taken it with her, which didn’t make sense. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom not to wash, but to be ill again. I clambered out of bed, head throbbing, and threaded myself into some clothes with about as much ease as pushing yarn through the eye of a needle. On the way out of the room I grabbed her washing bag, just in case.
The bathroom was deserted. There was no one in the stalls, and both the bath and the shower cubicles were empty. Not only empty, but cold, and silent, and dry. I walked back to the room quickly, my head feeling much clearer already. Strangely clear, in fact: it generally takes an hour or so for my head to start recovering from a hangover. Hands on hips I looked around the room and tried to work out where she’d be. Then I noticed the shade of the clouds outside, and suddenly turned to look at my watch on the table.
It was twenty to four in the afternoon.
For a moment I had a complete sensation of panic, as if I’d overslept and missed the most important meeting of my life. Or even worse, perhaps, as if it were just starting, this minute, on the other side of town. The feeling subsided, but only slightly, as I scrabbled round the room for some more clothes. Normally I have to bathe in the mornings, will simply not enter company without doing so: which is part of why I say now that I already knew something was wrong. Perhaps something that had happened the night before, something that I had forgotten, told me that things were amiss. A bath didn’t seem important.
It took five minutes to find the room keys where I’d dropped them, and then I locked the room and walked quickly down the corridor. I ducked my head into the bathroom again, but nothing had changed. As I passed one of the other doors I flinched slightly, expecting to hear some sound, but none came. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting.
The lower floor of the guest house was equally deserted. I checked in what passed as the breakfast room, although they would obviously have stopped serving by late afternoon. I stood in front of the desk and even rang the bell, but no one appeared. Pointlessly I ran back upstairs again, checked the room, and even knocked timidly on one of the other doors. There was no response.
Downstairs again I wandered into the sitting room, wondering what to do. There was no reason for the increasing unease and downright fright I was feeling. Susan wouldn’t have just left me. She must be out in town somewhere, with everyone else. It was Festival day, after all. Maybe she’d wanted to see it. Maybe she’d told me that last night, and I’d been too splatted to take it in.
The two cups we’d drunk tea out of the night before were still there, still sitting on the table next to the Festival pamphlet. Frowning, I walked towards them. Guest house landladies are generally obsessed with tidiness. And where was she, anyway? Surely she didn’t just abandon her guest house because a poxy town Festival was on?
As I looked at the cups I experienced a sudden lurching in my stomach, which puzzled me. It was almost like a feeling I used to get looking through the window of a certain pizza chain, when I saw the thick red sauce that coated the pizzas on the plates of the people inside. When you’ve seen and felt that same sauce coming out of your nose while you’re buckled up over a toilet in the small hours, you tend not to feel too positive about it in the future. The reaction has nothing to do with your mind, but a lot to do with the voiceless body making its warning clear in the only way it can.
A feeling of nausea. Why should I feel that about tea?
I moved a little closer to the table and peered into the cups. One had a small amount left in the bottom, which was to be expected: Susan never quite finished a cup. My cup was empty. At the bottom of the cup, almost too faintly to be seen, the pottery sparkled slightly, as if something there was irregularly reflecting the light. Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach without warning, I kneeled beside the table to take a closer look.
I hadn’t had sugar in my tea last night. I never do. I gave it up three years ago and lost over half-a-stone, and I’m vain enough to want to keep it that way. But there was something in the bottom of the cup. I picked the other cup up and tilted it slightly. The small puddle of tea rocked to reveal a similar patch on the bottom. It was less defined than in my cup, but it was still there.
Something had been put in our tea.
I looked up suddenly at the door, sure that it had moved. I couldn’t see any difference, but I stood up anyway. I stood up and I ran out of the house.
As I walked quickly down the front towards the square I tried to make sense of what I’d found. To a degree it added up. I’d felt very, very strange when I’d gone upstairs the night before, strange in a way I’d never experienced through alcohol before. I’d hugely overslept too, which also made sense, and the hangover I’d woken up with had passed differently to usual.
As I approached the square I slowed down a little. I realised that I’d been expecting lots of people to be gathered there, celebrating this benighted village’s Festival. There was no one. The corner of the square I could see was as empty as it had been the night before.
Susan, on the other hand, had got up early. Which also made sense: she’d thrown up immediately after we’d drunk the tea. Less of it would have made it into her bloodstream, and she’d not have experienced the same effects. That made sense. That was fine.
But two things weren’t fine, and didn’t make sense whichever way I added them up.
The second question was less clear-cut, but bothered me even more. Susan had an iron constitution, and could hold her drink. She could drink like a fish, to be honest. So why had she thrown up, so long after drinking, when I hadn’t?
Perhaps she was supposed to. Perhaps the drug, whatever it was, had different effects on different people.
The square was completely deserted. I stood still for a moment, trying to work out what to do next. There was no bunting, no posters, nothing to suggest a town event was in progress. I turned around slowly, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise. It was unnaturally quiet in that rotten, decomposing square, abnormally empty and silent. It didn’t just feel as if no one was there. It felt like the fucking Twilight Zone.
I walked across to The Aldwinkle and peered in through the window. The pub was empty and the lights were off, but I tried the door anyway. It was open. Inside I stood at the bar and shouted, but no one came. Something had happened in the pub after we had been there last night. Some of the chairs had been shunted to the side of the room, and others put in their place. They looked like the chairs in the guest house, ugly and misshapen. Their occupants had obviously had better luck when trying to buy a drink: a few of the small glasses lay scattered on one of the tables. One of the Festival pamphlets lay there too, and I irritably swatted it aside. It fluttered noisily to the floor and fell open, displaying its ridiculous inaccuracies. R’lyeh iä fhtagn!, for example. What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
It did at least make me think more clearly. The Festival had started at three o’clock. I knew that. What I didn’t know was where it had started. Presumably it took the form of a procession, which began at one end of the town and ended at another, possibly in the square. Perhaps I was here too early. I was now hopping from foot to foot with anxiety over Susan, and felt that anything had to be worth trying. If the Festival wouldn’t come to me, I’d bloody well go and find it.
I launched myself out of the pub, slamming the door shut behind me, and ran off towards the opposite corner of the square. I carried on up the little road, past yet more dilapidated houses, casting glances down narrow side roads. When the road began to peter out into cliffside I turned and went another way. And another. And another.
It didn’t take long for the streets to sap what little courage I’d injected myself with. It was like running through a dream where the horror you fear round each corner turns out to be the horror of nothing at all. No one leant on their fences, passing the time of day. No one was hanging out washing. No little children ran carelessly through the streets or up the cobbled alleys. No one, in short, was doing anything. All there was to see was rows of dirty houses, many with upper windows which seemed to have been boarded up. It was a ghost town.
And then I found something. Or thought I did.
I was moving a little more slowly by then, fifteen years of cigarettes taking their toll. To be absolutely honest I was bent over near a street corner, hands on my knees, vigorously coughing my guts up. When the fit subsided I raised my head and thought I heard something. A piping sound.
Jerking myself upright, I snapped my head this way and that, trying to determine where the sound was coming from. I thought it might be from back the way I’d come, perhaps in a parallel road, and jogged up the street. I couldn’t hear anything there, but I ducked into the next side road anyway. There I heard the sound again, a little louder, and something else: the rustle of distant conversation. Casting a fearful glance up at the darkening sky I pelted down the road.
I turned the corner cautiously. There was nothing there, but I knew there had been. I’d just missed it. I ran along the road to the next corner and listened, trying to work out which way the procession had gone. I chose left and soon heard noise again, louder this time: an odd tootling music, and the babble of strange voices. The sound made me pause for a moment, and another fragment of the previous evening slipped into my head. Was it a noise like that, an unwholesome and hateful gurgling, which I had heard behind one of the guest house doors?
Suddenly the sounds seemed to be coming from a different direction, and I whirled to follow them. Then, quite by chance, I happened to be looking over the abandoned garden of one of the houses I was passing when I saw something through the gap between it and its neighbour. Three sticks, about a foot apart, moving in the opposite direction to me. As they progressed they appeared to rock slightly, and it was that which made the connection. They weren’t just sticks. I couldn’t be certain, because it was now fairly dark. But to me they looked like little masts.
I’d thought I couldn’t run any faster, that my lungs would surely protest and perhaps burst. But I doubled back on myself and sprinted up the street, taking the corner on the slide. The street was empty but this time I was sure I saw the flicker of someone’s ankle as they disappeared around the corner, and I pelted down the road towards it.
I don’t know what made me glance at the house at the end. It was almost certainly just an accident, something for my head to do while my body did all the running. Just before I reached the end my eyes drifted across the filthy pane of its main window, and what I saw— or thought I saw—terrified me into losing my balance and falling. I seemed to take a long time to fall, and my mind insists that this is what I saw as I did.
A face, almost merged with the shadows of the room behind the window. A face that started off as something else, something unrecognisable and alien, something which slid and twitched into a normal face faster than the eye could see. A normal face that looked a little like the publican’s, and a little like Miss Dawton’s. And like, I realised, that of the old crone from the guest house, especially when we’d returned last night. It wasn’t simply make-up which had made the difference, far from it. If I hadn’t been so drunk I think I would have realised at the time. I think the make-up had been put on to hide something else.
And there was one more thing about the face. It looked a little bit like my mother.
All that passed through my head in the time it took me to fall, and was smacked out of it when my head cracked into a kerbstone.
My knee felt badly grazed and twisted, but I was up on my feet immediately, backing hurriedly away from the house. There was nothing to see in the window. No one was there. Maybe they never had been. Nevertheless I turned and ran away.
It started to rain then, at first drizzling, but then settling into a steady downpour. I plodded down one street after another, sometimes thinking I heard something, sometimes hearing nothing but water. My head hurt by then, and blood ran down the side of my face, mingling with the falling rain and running down into my shirt. At the slightest sound I started and whirled around, but too sluggishly to make any difference. I couldn’t seem to think in straight lines. It didn’t feel like it had the night before. It just felt as if I was terribly, miserably frightened.
In the end I gave up and headed towards the square as best I could, limping my way down the tangled streets. It should have occurred to me sooner I suppose, after all, I’d had the right idea in the beginning. I should have stayed where the procession might end. In retrospect I’m glad I was too stupid to realise that, but at the time I wearily cursed myself.
It didn’t make any difference. The square was still deserted. But they’d been there. That much was clear from the very atmosphere, from the feeling of recently emptied space. It was also obvious from the scraps of paper lying in gutters, which hadn’t been there before. I squatted to pick one or two of the sodden pieces up. They were from the pamphlet, as I might have expected. Yogsogo... one fragment said.... thulu mw’yleh iä... read another. Late, far too late, I wondered if it all meant something, if it was something more than a local idiosyncrasy or the result of a blind typist. I don’t think I can be blamed for not suspecting that earlier. All I’d wanted was a
weekend out of London. I wasn’t expecting anything else.
Looking back up through the slanting rain I noticed something. From where I was it looked as if the door to the pub was now open. I got up and walked towards it, taking occasional paranoid glances into the darkness at the other corners of the square.
No light was showing, but the door was open. The publican had left his pub. The landlady had abandoned her guest house. Were these people so trusting, or did they simply not care? My face in an unconscious wince of tension, I carefully pushed the door open a little farther. No sound came from the room, and when I poked my head cautiously within I saw it was completely empty. I stepped in. The room looked much as it had when I’d last been there, except at the bar. The flap which allowed access to the bar area had been lifted up and left that way, and the door behind was also open. I walked over and, wishing I had a God or religion to invoke, stepped behind the bar.
The first thing I did was to peer into the gloom of the second room, the one you could just see when standing at the bar. I couldn’t see much except chairs, all of the unusual shape. Then I turned and looked through the other door. The wall beyond was panelled with dark wood, and the narrow corridor it formed a part of stopped just past the door. I stepped through and looked to the left. Stone steps led down into darkness. I felt around for a light but couldn’t find one. Even if I had I doubt I would have had the courage to use it.
I thought for a moment before starting down. I wondered about running back to the guest house, checking if Susan had returned. Perhaps the Festival had ended, and she was waiting impatiently in the sitting room, wondering where I was.
I don’t know why I didn’t believe that was the way things were. I simply didn’t, and I went down the steps instead.
Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 42