Penny was visibly older than Alastair, but she was slim and healthy-looking, so it came as no surprise to find out she was a yoga teacher. Ralph was polite enough, I suppose, but a victim to that dislocated air that afflicts many children on the cusp of teen-hood. I’m sure he’d rather have been anywhere else than that table with its collection of ageing adults talking about their obsessive, exclusive little interests.
Sure enough, when we’d put down our spoons, he asked to be excused and that was the last I saw of him that night.
We adjourned to the sitting room.
“Comics and Nintendo,” his father said, dismissively, as we sat down.
“At least he’s reading,” I reasoned. “Comics didn’t do too badly for me when I was a lad.”
“That was then,” he said. “Your comics were filled with text. His comics are just excuses for a slew of jokes about burps, farts and bogeys.”
“There are worse things to pore over.”
“Oh, he does, believe me. Do you know a boy who isn’t fascinated by blood and death?”
“Ah,” I said. “But, there’s something you can exercise control over at least, no?”
Penny sniffed at that. “We can stop him from playing violent games, or watching video nasties, or whatever they’re called nowadays—”
“Barbaric Blu-Rays!” Alastair interjected.
“—but,” continued Penny, “we can’t, I won’t, censor the news. Even now.” She poured out the last of the wine.
I stared at her blankly. I hadn’t seen a front page or a news bulletin since Clarissa’s death. “What’s happened?”
“The Fisherman,” said Alastair, ominously.
I drained my glass. “The fisherman? What’s this, a quota story? I don’t see how that could possibly—”
“The Fisherman is a killer. He’s been preying on women for the past month. Always women. Always on or near beaches. Never inland. Their bodies are often found dumped in beds of seaweed.” Here Alastair lowered his voice and craned his neck as if he could ascertain whether Ralph was properly out of earshot. “And always, their wombs have been removed.”
“How ghastly,” I cried, and wished there was some of the wine left so I could rinse away the terrible, claggy feeling of dread at the back of my throat.
“Yes,” Penny said. She seemed a little pale, although that might have been down to the bleaching effect of the nearby lamp. “What’s worse is that these murders have not just been confined to one area.”
I spluttered some disbelieving grunt in response, but Alastair was nodding.
“It’s true,” he said. “The first body was discovered in Morecambe Bay. Two days later there was a body, same modus operandi, washed up on the beach in Oban, and then, where was the next one, Pen?”
“They’ve found them all over. Scarborough, Southwold, Newquay… the last one was in Portsmouth. Yesterday.”
The conversation had knocked the stuffing out of me. Silence seemed to have been enforced by the gravity of the story. Their wombs? What could they possibly—I sighed. I was a seventy-four-year-old man trying to understand the machinations of a world I’d outgrown. It was beyond me. And a part of me was glad.
The weather had died down a little and I didn’t want to go to bed with a thick head, so I bid them a good night and, availing myself of one of the torches by the front door, stepped out into the courtyard. Samphire and mesembryanthemum were growing wildly on the rocks across from the stairwell. I gently ran my hands over the foliage while my attention was drawn to the black cauldron of the sea, faintly visible beneath the ice-white frosting of light edging the clouds.
My curiosity had been piqued in regard to the Outpost Mr. Standish had done his best to scare me away from. No longer tired (in fact, I was rejuvenated by the sea air and the prospect of a little adventure), I skipped on to the greensward and picked a route up through the broken collars of rock to a channel carved into the face of the cliff. Here it was that I saw the first barrier to my progress, but it was little more than a wire-mesh fence, unattached, and I was able to lift and reposition it to allow me through.
Warning signs: DANGER. STEEP DROP. DO NOT ENTER. The torch showed me where to put my feet. Suddenly I was there, standing before an arch that did little more than frame a precipitous drop to the fangs of rock below. The walkway connecting the Outpost to the mainland was gone, destroyed by nature most likely. I imagined it had existed as a crow’s nest kind of place—the view of the sea was unhindered.
Perhaps a radio operator would have spent time there, ready to send an urgent telegram to the Wolf’s Lair at the first sign of aggression from His Majesty’s fleet. From here it looked like a tiny space, enough for one man and a rickety little bunk. I wished I could get across to satisfy my curiosity, but it was impossible.
Reluctantly, I turned back, but I had been re-energised and I fancied I’d need more of a walk to coax tiredness back into my limbs. Also, I’d been somewhat unnerved by Alastair’s revelations regarding The Fisherman (not to mention the lascivious glee he divined from relating the story) and I wanted to erase it, or at least remove it for the time being, from my thoughts. No man could entertain the prospect of sleep with that kind of nastiness flitting around his head.
Making sure I had a key to the front gate, I let myself out on to the causeway, and angled down to the beach.
III
LATE-NIGHT CONSTITUTIONAL • A CURIOSITY • THE OLD MAN •
A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP
Bliss! In all my time, even while I was courting Clarissa and we’d spent the odd weekend in Blackpool, I’d never taken a midnight stroll along the seashore. What I’d been missing!
I saw—or rather, heard—bats, and even felt their tiny wings changing the currents of the air close to my face. I saw phosphorescence in the waves—glimmering green beads of light strung out like a discarded necklace. I was convinced I felt the tremor of the sea as a whale crashed into it, playing deliriously and celebrating its freedom. I thought I might have heard it too, that wildly exciting, but strangely comforting sequence of moans and squeals, both mordant and uplifting in the same breath.
My feet crunched satisfyingly on the shingle beach, a melange of ancient pebbles, shells, polished fragments of glass and what have you, and my spirits were replenished. I trained the torch upon my intended route, to ensure I didn’t sprain an ankle on any rogue lengths of driftwood, but I needn’t have bothered—the ambient light cast by the concealed moon was sufficient to navigate by.
After a good half an hour, I was starting to feel properly tired, that good, ache-filled enervation that comes from honest endeavour. I knew I would sleep well, despite the oily smell of the Quarters and the thoughts of the ghosts of German soldiers who had visited any and all kinds of unpleasantness on the island’s prisoners. That was over seventy years ago, I admonished myself. You’ve lived your life in the span since then. Spilled milk, and all that.
I was about to turn in when the torchlight picked something out that caused my mind to snag for a second. That’s funny, I thought. Some anomaly in the pattern of the beach. I know that sounds a little strange, given that a beach of shingle can’t really lay claim to any sort of pattern, or logic, but there you have it. I felt a difference in the stones. And there it was. A pebble that was larger than the others (about the size of a lime, but flatter), highly polished, and with a hole bored right through, off-centre. It looked like something you might wear on a length of chain or leather.
It was a handsome chunk of stone, and I pocketed it immediately. I poked around for a few minutes more, thinking I might find another like it, but the beach had retained its anonymity. It was then, as I began the slow march back up to the causeway, that I was given another surprise.
I saw thrashing limbs breaking the surface of the sea, and a furious foaming as something came fast towards the shore. I caught my breath and staggered backwards, almost tripping in the shingle. The limbs disappeared, submerging, and the relative calm returned, but then
a great column of white rose as whatever it was resurfaced, this time head-first.
The water cascaded off it to reveal a naked man. I laughed out loud with relief and consternation. He seemed more stunned than I, however, and halted his progress from the water mid-stride, almost shying away from me as I padded through the shingle to greet him.
“Are you all right?” I called. I was dressed in thick layers but I could still feel the chill in the air. This man must have been swimming in temperatures close to freezing. He didn’t say anything and I thought, My God, he’s in shock. He’s been washed ashore from a ship run aground on the rocks. But then he seemed to find his voice and I realised his hesitation was down to a lack in his English—he was obviously from distant shores. Perhaps Scandinavian. Perhaps Slav.
“I apologise,” he said, “if I startle you.”
“It’s not a problem,” I assured him. “You just don’t expect to see people swimming at this time of night, at this time of the year.”
“I am swimming every day,” he said. “All year round.”
“Do you live on the island?”
“This area has been in my family’s blood for centuries.”
“My name’s Adrian,” I said, and extended my hand. He seemed nonplussed, as if he had never been taught the rituals of introduction.
“Gluckmann,” he said, finally, but he left my hand dangling.
I nodded, withdrew my arm, suddenly struck by the farcical situation I was in: chatting at midnight with a naked man of my own age—if not older—in the freezing cold.
“Well,” I said. “It was nice to meet you.”
I left him on the shore and picked my way back up to the causeway, pausing at the top to look back. He was still standing there, staring after me. There was no evidence of any clothes, or even a towel, nearby. I felt giddy. I felt as though I wanted to run away, as fast as I could.
We had not shaken hands, yet I felt as though my skin was greasy from his touch. And there was a smell in my clothes, though it hadn’t been there before I met him—a fishy smell, but not the clean, marine piquancy one knows from clean seawater; this was the days-old odour of tainted things, of rotting prawns and mussels gone bad. And hadn’t his skin been a little strange? Was it just that he was old that it seemed spongy and loose, with the texture of raw tripe? Was it merely the slackening of tissue from the piling on of years that gave his fingers a webbed appearance?
Nonsense, I told myself, over and over, as I fumbled to get the key in the lock with fingers that felt thick and unresponsive with fear. I was close to crying out, but I must not. If I disturbed the Cotterhams from their slumber I’d have some explaining to do, and I had nothing to offer beyond the unhinging of my own sanity.
Once I had the door closed on the world, I leaned my head against the wood and tried to calm my laboured heart. I felt his scrutiny through the stone ramparts. Was that who I’d seen earlier? Both from the window of the plane, and while taking in the view from the Soldier’s Quarters? Nonsense, nonsense. But the conviction would not be dissolved, no matter how much I tried to reason with myself.
You would die if you spent too much time in that water. Exposure, hypothermia… yet he had looked as unbothered by the perilous temperatures as an elephant seal, his flesh retaining a healthy pinkness despite its saggy constitution.
I stumbled towards bed, making sure I locked the door of the Soldier’s Quarters. The cold had not been vanquished by that old radiator. Fully clothed, I slid between the sheets of my bed and fell into a tortuous sleep populated by an impossible creature, born from the silly discomfort that Gluckmann had instilled in me, yet blown up into a thing of terror so alarming I could barely credit how my mind had come to fashion it.
My imagination was that of a normal human being, a dull old man if I was being honest. I had never been a fan of the kind of films that were popular among the young: films about death and blood, full of monsters that hunted for human meat. Not my cup of tea. And yet here was a beast that would not look out of place in such a feature.
I dreamed of the old man standing at the sea’s edge, and changing… His horribly soft skin hung in swags around him like discarded clothes. Beneath this thin film that kept his shape vaguely human thrashed an oily roil of cartilaginous limbs, a knot of furious movement like that of an overdue infant impatient to be born. I saw the shudder of his head as his jaws reared back, carrying such a great cargo of teeth that they ought not be able to fit in a human mouth. He was making awful gluk-gluk noises in his throat, which was blocked, crammed with food he had not chewed properly.
His eyes bulged as he worked this mass, but even as he struggled to swallow whatever it was, he was raising more fistfuls of dinner to mash between his fangs—what looked like filthy carrot tops, but which resolved themselves into the hair of dismembered men, women and children, burst and broken between his fingers. He was gigantic, then, though my dream up until that point had not given me a frame of reference against which he could be measured.
I felt myself, in that sickly incapable way one has in nightmares, try to turn and run as his bloodshot eyes found me, but he was upon me within one stride. I could smell the high, ammoniac reek of his breath, feel the chill of his body assault me like hammering waves at a weather-beaten shoreline. I knew his name, though it made my brain bleed from every aperture to think it, let alone say it, if indeed I had the tongue for such a conglomeration of alien sounds.
Uhogguath. Uhogguath.
It sounded like the kind of wet, stertorous breathing a predator does when it is head-deep in carrion. His hand closed around me. I felt his fingers squeeze the life from my lungs. Red filled my vision. I felt the grind of bones as he pulverised my body, felt the furnace of his lungs as they churned carious breath around the target of my head.
When I woke up, my nails having dug into the palms hard enough to draw blood, the name was so much air hissing from between my teeth and I could barely remember it, only that my speaking of it in the dream had caused the oceans to yawn open to their beds, where pregnant things struggled and palpated and razored each other with claws, foul and black like something found rotting at the bottom of a fruit bowl. Things that were not for the sane to alight upon.
The wind was howling once more at the edges of the room and, had I not been reassured that the rock and the living quarters were almost one and the same, I would have believed that the weather could tear open the face of the cliff and deliver me to this churning sea where its bedevilled, unnatural population would devour me in a trice.
IV
THE DISAGREEABLE MATTER OF THE HARE • FISH AND CHIPS •
AN UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT • THE CORNER OF MY EYE
After a shower, and a modest breakfast—a handful of nuts mixed with Greek yoghurt and honey—I felt emboldened enough to share the dream with my fellow guests. Penny blanched somewhat when I told her about the realisation that the fistful of carrot-tops was nothing of the sort.
“I think that’s easily the most dreadful thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“Oh come,” protested her husband. “There are worse things every night on the news. This is a dream, a confection of the brain, that’s all.” I could see that he was unhappy with me. I hadn’t thought this through, convinced only that it would make for an amusing anecdote. All it had done was upset Penny, position Alastair against me as a result, and remind me of the whole sordid evening. Ralph was the only one who seemed impressed by my narrative.
“I found this on the beach,” I said, rooting in my pocket, desperate to claw back some vestige of respect. I held up the stone like a trophy. “Pretty little thing, isn’t it?”
And it was, even more so in daylight. The stone had been washed smooth by countless millennia of tidal movement, the hole perhaps created by centuries of focused boring by a channel of water when it had become trapped in one position. Penny was suitably impressed, and I felt the mood change for the better.
She took the stone from me—I felt a sudden
pang of resentment at that—and cooed over the striations in the stone, the little glints and glimmers of silica or quartz. I found my resentment deepen when she started to lecture me about what it was called.
“An adder stone,” she said, “or a hag stone. They’re meant to possess magical properties. Some would have it that they’re made from the hardened saliva of a nest of dragons or serpents, the hole made by the stabbing of their tongues. They work like charms, warding off curses or disease. And if you look through the hole, you can detect traps, or see the true identity of witches or other supernatural creatures.”
“Thank you for that lesson,” I said, somewhat tartly, and extended my hand. Penny returned the stone and I slipped it into my pocket. “There are others, I’m sure, if you do a little hunting.” I felt awkward now that the stone was back in my possession, as if I’d humiliated a child. There remained a stiltedness in the atmosphere that would not be relieved.
I decided to do the honourable thing and retreat for a few hours. The wind was stiff still, but not quite so savage as it had been first thing and anyway, its bark, especially in the exposed knuckle of the Soldier’s Quarters, was much worse than its bite. The clouds were torn to shreds by it, allowing a bright, wintry sun to have some say in the matter.
I decided to unlock one of the guest bicycles and take a ride to Bray beach via the coastal road. If I found a windbreak, I could warm up over the newspaper for an hour or two before a spot of lunch.
The romantic notion I had of myself pedalling gaily along a picturesque coastline was swiftly banished once I found myself travelling against the wind. I was breathing heavily by the time I reached the end of the causeway, and I stopped to button my jacket closed in a bid to lessen its drag quotient.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 16