Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones (Editor)

  The Kraken sleepeth...”

  I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”

  He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”

  He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff-tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.

  “They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise...”

  “For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”

  “Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon, till you reach Manuxet Way and then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door, and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”

  “You sure?”

  “No one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.

  It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground, like white mists. From street level I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign, or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.

  We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.

  Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:

  “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.

  “There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by men and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise...”

  He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence, with blown snow stinging our faces.

  And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.

  Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. The Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.

  The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the seashore, more than you could ever see back in the city.

  At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting—one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.

  “Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.

  I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below; classic spook lighting.

  “Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminium siding.

  “To stop the world ending?”

  He laughed at me, then.

  The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatological about it...” he murmured, in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

  The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.

  “This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the Deep Ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark, old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”

  The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.

  Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water-dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.

  It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.

  “Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this; a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”

  I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.

  Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.

  Smell improves, too. The aluminium-siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.

  And the figure in the silks...

  I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat, and rotten flesh.

  The silks fluttered. She was moving towards me. She held the knife.

  “Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber colour, and filling my mind with its pale light.

  “Madame Ezekiel?”

  “You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”

  “I don’t die,” I told her. “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night. Remember?”

  “It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”

  “No.”

  The bonfire burned brighter now, burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae, and of slowly-drifting weed; burned with the colour of emeralds.

  “You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife, and you kill them. That’s all.”

  I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.

  She sliced across my throat.

  Blood began to gush, and then to flow. And then it slowed, and stopped...

  —The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming towards me from the night

  —I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt —my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night.

  My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air. I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow. I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her. There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist surrounding me. High in my leap I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soapbubble...

  ***

  I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor, at the entrance to some kind of citadel, built of enormous, rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

  A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

  She was standing in the doorway, in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

  There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms, and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

  I felt like I was being crushed.
I couldn’t think any more.

  She moved towards me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.

  I pushed with my hind-legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face, and felt something rend and tear.

  It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep...

  ***

  I landed softly on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws.

  The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.

  The silver knife lay on the ground, in the snow. I waited on all fours, in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.

  I was dizzy, and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs.

  Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the frog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they plop-plopped down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.

  There was a loud noise. It was the fox-haired bartender, the popeyed aluminium-siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.

  He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”

  I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but I couldn’t talk any more, only growl and whine and howl.

  He was crying. He stank of insanity, and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

  Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

  In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliffside as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark grey. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff, until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

  A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

  “What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.”

  I bristled.

  “No, it’s over, for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names, while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

  I looked up at the fat man, and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck, sleepily.

  “Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane, in any material sense.”

  The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

  “Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the selfsame celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath...”

  He continued talking, in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning: I had no further interest in the sea or the clifftop or the fat man.

  There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter night’s air.

  And I was, above all things, hungry.

  ***

  I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.

  The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.

  My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon it would be whole once more.

  The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.

  I was cold and naked and bloody and alone; ah well, I thought: it happens to all of us, in the beginning. I just get it once a month.

  I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn, or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.

  A hawk flew low over the snow toward me, with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small grey squid in the snow at my feet, and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.

  I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care any more; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.

  AFTERWORD

  CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

  His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

  PS Publishing recently published the novels Ghosts Know and The Kind Folk, along with the definitive edition of his early Arkham House collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Forthcoming from the same publisher is a new Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki.

  Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of both the British Fantasy Society and the Society of Fantastic Films.

  “‘The Church in High Street’ is more of a collaboration between me and August Derleth than his HPL ‘collaborations’ were,” observes the author.

  “The first book of Lovecraft’s I read made me into a writer. I read it in a single malingering day off school, and for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but the greatest writer I had ever read. I wrote my Lovecraftian tales for my own pleasure: the pleasure of convincing myself that they were as good as the originals.

  “It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been ge
ntler if he’d realised I was only fifteen years old.

  “I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing. Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten ‘The Tomb-Herd’, which he accepted under certain conditions: that the title should be changed to ‘The Church in the High Street’ (though he later dropped the latter article) and that he should be able to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several passages that are Derleth’s paraphrases of what I wrote.

  “Quite right too: as I think he realised, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.”

  DAVE CARSON was born in Northern Ireland in 1955. He first discovered the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft when he came across ‘The Lurking Fear’ in a 1960s issue of The Magazine of Horror. He was hooked for life and has since become one of the genre’s most acclaimed and respected illustrators of the author’s work. It was probably in the pages of that same digest magazine that he first saw the artwork of Virgil Finlay and his personal favourite, Lee Brown Coye.

  It was not until 1978 that he began to take a more serious approach to his illustration work, developing his use of the pen and ink stipple technique. The following year he discovered The British Fantasy Society and soon he was being published in such magazines as Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Weirdbook, Nyctalops, Kadath, Fantasy Book, Ghosts and Scholars, Dark Horizons, Fear, Skeleton Crew, Interzone, Imagine, White Dwarf and many others.

  The artist’s iconic 1979 poster ‘H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937’ is still selling to this day and was even reproduced in Fortean Times and The Observer’s Review supplement to accompany a book review about Lovecraft.

  Among the numerous books that Carson’s artwork has appeared in are: Tales Out of Innsmouth: New Stories of the Children of Dagon, Brian Lumley’s Ghoul Warning, Mad Moon of Dreams and The Clock of Dreams, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, the Dark Voices: The Pan Books of Horror series, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: A Guide to Lovecraftian Horror, the “Fighting Fantasy” role-playing book Beneath Nightmare Castle, Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Horror Painting Workshop and The Octopus Encyclopedia of Horror.