She was prepared to attempt reconciliation. And so was he, desperate for it, in fact. But would he have to tell her about last night? Could he live with the guilt either way? He found himself questioning what the fuck he was doing about anything in his life, but knew one thing. He wanted Skye.
Dean was saying something.
“Sorry, what?”
“Man, you are out of it. Too much to drink, eh? I was saying that a few of us scored last night. That girl you took upstairs, she’s not with the conference. She’s local.”
Howard frowned. Nodded dumbly. “She said something about that. But she moved away.”
“There’s a few of them, they came to hang out knowing we were in town.” Dean leaned forward, conspiratorial. “You look at most people here and who can blame them? It’s ugly central in this town, right?”
Howard tried to remember what he and Darya had talked about all evening but it was hazy. He couldn’t remember much at all. “You scored too then?”
Dean beamed. “And it was good, man!”
“Was she…” Howard swallowed, shook his head. He had been about to say Was she cold, but that just seemed absurd.
“Was she what?”
“Doesn’t matter. Good for you, man.” He pushed his plate aside, appetite gone. “I gotta call my wife.”
“Guilty conscience!” Dean grinned around a mouthful of toast, wagged a butter knife like an accusatory finger.
Howard walked around the harbour, talking to Skye about the future, and he felt encouraged. The conversation was uncomfortable, but she reiterated her desire for a break, he said he would like that. She told him to enjoy his conference and his party, and it sounded as though she meant it. He hung up wracked with guilt.
He looked around, wondering if he might see more of Innsmouth before day two of the conference but though the town wasn’t nearly as dilapidated as he had thought that first night, it was still run down, dirty, uninviting. Pale, wide faces stared around door frames, as if wishing him away, hoping he wouldn’t stray into their shop. One large building had a peeling sign, Maron Shipping and Freight. He’d seen that name in several places around town, for some reason that unsettled him. With a shiver he returned to the hotel.
***
During lunch, after eating floury apples and damp sandwiches of fish paste, Howard went upstairs to nap, to catch up from his disturbed sleep of the night before. He dreamed again of the underwater city, walked to the high, wide doors, but paused, nervous. He thought of Darya, of Skye, and cried out in frustration. Ice water flooded his mouth and he startled awake. His clothes were wet, like the mother of all cold sweats. He changed and went back downstairs for the afternoon session. What he would give to be warm and dry.
***
Rather than brave the unwelcoming streets with Dean, he ate the hotel stew again. The same lumpy casserole as before. The meat was tough for fish, odd lumps in places, the gravy waxy and thick. He would kill for a good old burger and chips, but didn’t really care. He thought only of seeing the conference out, enjoying the party, then getting home to Skye. Even the party now seemed like a chore. Skye had been right, it was grown adults trying to recapture lost childhood and it was sad. The hotel had used the company’s products to decorate in preparation and it all struck him as garish and tacky.
He promised himself he wouldn’t drink again, but Dean returned and bought the first round and anything seemed better than sobriety at that point. By around ten o’clock he was warmly inebriated, relaxing, when Darya appeared beside him.
“I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye. You were sleeping. You were… very deep.”
Howard licked suddenly dry lips. “I didn’t expect…”
“You didn’t expect me back? I had to work, but I came as soon as I finished.” She raised a glass, clinked it against his. He opened his mouth to speak, to say something about Skye, about his life, but she silenced him with cold lips over his. Her briny tongue caressed his and dizziness swept through him. Over her shoulder he saw Dean entwined with another woman, similar looking to Darya. Dean gave a thumbs up, then returned all his attention to his new friend.
Howard tried to glance around the bar. So many other people there, but they were so many blank faces in a sea of weirdness. Only Darya appeared solid. Only she showed any detail for his eye to lock onto. He swallowed hard, wondered if he was more drunk than he had realised. Darya kissed him again, cold and salty, and it inflamed every fibre of him. She pulled back, handed him another drink. Where had that come from? It tasted strong, at least a double measure. With an internal sob of frustration he swallowed it down and let his mind swim.
Darya pulled him by the hand, led him to his room, where they repeated the night before, faster, harder, better than ever. As he frantically kissed along her neck, thrusting powerfully, his lips passed over a row of thin striations. He leaned back to look and saw three almost imperceptible slits in the skin at the side of her throat that quickly closed together as though they had never been. Darya pulled his face down between her breasts, bucking up into him desperately.
***
Howard dreamed again of the serpentine temple, the tall, rangy priests exhorting the congregation with complicated signs. As he stared, he began to somehow understand the gestures, He is ready to rise and He has slept for long enough.
Something in the broken, truncated messages caused rills of terror to flood through Howard and he felt the intense pressure of his held breath. He wanted to breathe deeply and join the huddled masses and simultaneously wanted to run far away, to Skye, and feel the genuine warmth of her embrace.
The urge to run won out and he stumbled from the temple, along the softly winding streets. He remembered this ocean was not earthly, but a place in between, a place that flowed within all things. He kicked hard from the street and swam up, keeping only Skye in his mind, and found himself swimming over their shared bedroom, so far away. She slept there, alone in the bed, one arm thrown across where he should have been. Across her pillow was the shirt he had been wearing the day before he left, looking rumpled and unwashed. She must have it there for the scent of him. His heart ached.
He gasped, ice water rushed through him, and he woke.
Darya was gone.
***
The mood in the dining room was sombre, faces dark. It took a moment to find out why, but Howard soon discovered there had been a tragedy. Dean Stringer was dead.
“What happened?” Howard asked of Sarah Cheeseman, taking a spare seat at the table she shared with two others.
“Drowned,” Sarah told him.
“What?”
“But found in his bed!” Gary Clarke said, shaking his head.
“Drowned in his bed?”
Gary barked a laugh. “According to the authorities I overheard talking to the boss, he fell in the harbour and drowned late last night. A local carried him to bed, not realising he was dead, thinking he was just drunk.”
Howard frowned. “Who does that?”
Gary shrugged. “No idea. But you can’t actually drown in your bed, can you!”
“Geoff Day was here a moment before you arrived,” Sarah said. “Despite the horrible event, we’re to see through the conference and party.”
“It’s what Dean would have wanted, according to Day,” Gary said, his face bleak.
Howard mechanically forked wet, thin scrambled eggs into his mouth, not really tasting them.
***
Howard wanted to go home, but it was October 31, last day of the conference and Halloween. It was a long drive, he was prepared to make his excuses and leave, but Geoff Day opened proceedings with a request that everyone honour Dean Stringer by sticking together, considering the Day & Gohn Inc. family had meant so much to Dean. Had it really? Howard wondered. Haunted faces filled the auditorium, all wearing a mask of determination. He would look like a dick
if he ran out now.
“Call me superstitious if you will,” Day said in a strong voice, “but this Halloween sees a planetary conjunction that occurs only once every few hundred years. And it’s happening on our day, on Halloween! That’s why we’re here, in this place, at this time. We’ll see our numbers grow!”
Day went on to announce the year’s best performers and Howard gasped when he was named again as Regional Sales Manager of the Year. Confused by the applause and faces that still bore shock under a veneer of celebration, he went to the stage, accepted his plaque and bonus cheque. How could he have outperformed everyone despite his crumbling life? Was his competition here that weak? He needed more from life than everything represented by this award. And he knew there was so much more to be experienced.
During lunch he called Skye and said how much he missed her, and he wasn’t lying. But something else had occurred to him and he knew it would appeal to her esoteric mindset.
“I’m going to swim the sea of dreams tonight and come to you,” he said, huddled for privacy in a corner under the polished stairs.
She laughed. “That right?”
“I’m serious. This place has been giving me crazy dreams. Last night I swam to you and watched you sleeping.”
“That’s a little creepy, love.”
“No, it was beautiful.”
“It sounds like a nice dream,” she said, amending her opinion.
He took a deep breath, ready to test his theory. “You’re sleeping with my blue shirt on your pillow.”
Her gasp at the other end was quickly suppressed, then a moment of silence.
“Skye?”
“How could you know that?”
“I think it’s wonderful.”
“But how could you know?”
“I told you, I’ve been dreaming, deeper than you could imagine. I’ll come tonight, in your dreams, and we’ll swim together.”
Skye laughed again, but there was an edge of nervousness to it. “You’re kinda freaking me out, but okay. I’ll look forward to that.”
***
The conference wrapped and when they emerged from the meeting rooms back into the bar, it was dressed up like a funfair haunted house. Cobwebs everywhere, bats and pumpkins and witches on broomsticks swung from every available point. Among the regular Halloween décor were bizarre chitinous creatures, like plastic parodies of lobsters and crabs with uncannily articulated limbs, set as if they crept across every surface, hunting for something.
Music blared from the rig of a DJ in one corner, rotating lights with blue and green filters turned, casting flickering underwater shades across the walls and ceiling. Food and drinks were laid out on tables. Howard ignored it all, keen to be on his own. Darya came to him, her hips swaying like a soft tide, eyes hooded. He saw her now as cold and dangerous, the image of Dean with another woman disturbingly similar to Darya leapt through his mind and made his stomach churn.
She held out a drink, began to say something. Howard pushed the drink aside, shook his head. “Not tonight! No more, okay?”
Her face flashed fury and for a startling moment sharp teeth bristled behind her full lips, three slits either side of her throat gaped angrily, then flattened shut again. Howard’s mouth fell open, fear trickled through his limbs. Darya’s expression softened as she glanced past Howard’s shoulder. He turned to see what she was looking at and saw Geoff Day gesture to the woman, his fingers mimicking the silent sermons he had witnessed in his dreams. Enough. Howard’s eyes widened and he turned back to see Darya’s reaction, but she had already turned away, offering his drink to another employee. Gary Clarke, he realised absently, who he had spoken to over breakfast.
Howard looked back to Geoff Day, but the boss was already deep in conversation with others, his face wide with laughter.
Howard hurried to this room. He locked the door and sighed with relief. All he wanted was to hold Skye. And he wanted to show her the wonders of the world he had discovered under reality. The peculiarity of people notwithstanding, that place called to him, cajoled him to fly in its endless depths, and he had to take Skye there. He would show her adventure. He could ignore the dark city. These people be damned, he and Skye had journeys to enjoy.
He watched the hours crawl by until he was sure Skye would be in bed, then fell into his cold, damp sheets and closed his eyes. He relaxed and breathed deeply, thinking only of sleep and the deeps of the ocean below the world. He smiled as he gently walked the streets of the serpentine city, supported by the salt waters of infinity. But not to be tempted, he kicked away and swam up, distancing himself from the temple, thinking only of Skye.
He saw the floral designs of the bed linen in the shadows beneath him and swam down to her. His held breath began to burn his lungs, but he knew he had held it for impossibly long periods before this dream, on previous nights. He could hold it longer still. Long enough to show her wonders.
He put a hand on Skye’s shoulder and she startled awake, looked around herself with wide eyes. Then she looked up at Howard, her expression both impressed and full of disbelief. He nodded, pointed at the pillow below her, his shirt. You’re dreaming, he said with complicated patterns of his fingers that suddenly came as naturally as blinking. We’re dreaming together in the oceans of infinity.
He pushed aside his guilt at thoughts of what he had done with Darya, took Skye’s hand. She let herself be lifted and they swam together. Unsure where to go, they drifted, and then there was the city below them. He was shocked to see the entire congregation in the streets outside the temple, looking up with wide, sad faces. The tall priests stalked among them, more than a dozen of them, then as one they turned their thin faces upwards too. Their wrongly jointed arms raised and together they spoke in sign, telling Howard and Skye to breathe, to let infinity in and feel the sacred blessing of the eternal Dagon.
Of course.
Howard laughed, knew that any resistance was pointless. The ocean was already in him, had been since his lips had first touched Darya’s. This was inevitable. He turned Skye to him and her face was twisted in terror, eyes wide. She shook her head side to side, hair floating behind like a halo in the currents. She opened her mouth to scream, tried to pull away from him, but he held her tight, his hands around her upper arms. He opened his mouth and drew in a great breath of salty ice water and nodded at her to do the same. As her scream came to an end she had no choice but to do so and he refused to let her go. This was them together at last. Always together.
***
Geoff Day, CEO of Day & Gohn Inc., stood with Cecil Maron, the Innsmouth Chief of Police, Geoff’s cousin on his mother’s side. Beside them stood Stanley Maron, Cecil’s brother, the town’s forensic examiner. They surrounded Howard Bloch’s hotel bed, where Howard lay cold and wet. His blackened eyes stared unseeing at the mould-stained ceiling.
“You’ve filled in the paperwork?” Geoff Day asked his cousins.
Cecil nodded. “Drowned in the harbour. Hell of a thing.”
Stanley signed off the sheets of paper on the battered clipboard, returned it to his cousin.
“The next of kin?” Day asked.
Cecil laughed, a clotted, wet sound. “Wife. Spoke to the local PD this morning. Says it’s the damndest thing, they found her dead in her bed at home. All signs point to drowning.”
Day joined in the laughter as they left the room, allowing hotel staff in to tidy up. “Dagon’s eyes see you,” Day said to his cousins as they parted in the hotel lobby.
“And find you pious,” they both replied in unison as they stepped out into the rain.
The House on Jimtown Road
Ran Cartwright
Two days and it would be Hallowe’en.
Falcon Point was in full spook mode as if the area wasn’t already spooky enough. You’d think so with the tales of spooks, ghosts, shadows, rumors of things in the bay, the ruin
s of the old Enoch Conger place out on the Point (who the Hell knows what happened to old Enoch; a lot of silly tales were spread back in the day, but were largely discounted long ago). And, of course, across the bay to the north was that fish bait slime pit, Innsmouth. That place alone is enough to spook your drawers down around your ankles.
But the tikes and teens just love their Hallowe’en.
So, parents were running off to Kingsport with their happy laughing wild-eyed youngin’s buying Hallowe’en decorations, costumes off the shelf, pumpkins to carve into Jack o’Lanterns, and bags and bags of candy to satisfy those wild-eyed youngin’s that would be showing up on their doorsteps.
Jack o’Lanterns decorated porches and sidewalks. Fake cobwebs were strung across doorframes, windows, and front yard shrubs. Fake tombstones decorated yards, and dancing skeletons, witches with glowing eyes, zombies, and bed sheet ghosts were popping up everywhere. And there was the Jaycee’s haunted house, decorated to thrill the older thrill seekers.
Yeah, Hallowe’en was just two days away.
And there were those late teens, early twenties folk looking for a good time, parties, pranks, and tricks.
Like Martin Gilford.
Martin was always looking for a good time, a prank, a trick, a laugh. Mostly at someone else’s expense. Hallowe’en provided the perfect excuse. Yeah, at someone else’s expense.
“I’ve got an idea,” Martin said with a grin, leaning over the table in Falcon Point’s Dockside Diner.
It was nigh on evening and the diner was mostly empty; most of those who frequented the joint had gone home to prep for the coming spooks and festivities.
“You always have some fool stunt of an idea,” Billy Finley said from across the table, a blank expression on his face. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
The guys were sitting with their girls in that diner booth, Martin with that young hot blonde, Julie Harper, and Billy with that young hot brunette, Donna Wilson.
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