As I did so, I nervously eyed the surf, searching for a glimpse of Mr. Gluckmann. But surely he would be at work today? I tried to imagine what sort of job he did, but could not shake the unpleasant images of him picking his teeth with the splintered bones of something he’d just consumed. He looked like the type of person who entertained vast appetites. When he wasn’t swimming, I imagined him eating—his wide, fleshy mouth enveloping tidbits like some ravenous sucking loach at the bottom of a fish tank.
I set myself against the wind once more and wobbled upright, but then my eye was distracted by something on the causeway, blocking my route, and I almost fell from the saddle. Covering my mouth with my hand, I pushed the bicycle to the edge of an apron of blood. It was dried into the causeway rock, but it possessed a lighter shade, suggesting it had not been long since it had been spilled.
At the centre of this was a hare, or the remains of a hare—all I could discern amid the twisted, denuded limbs, was a pair of matted ears and a few dried, salt-encrusted organs that were either inedible or a mouthful too far for whatever had destroyed the poor thing. The chewed, grey foreleg bones poked from the shredded sleeves of its fur like knitting needles freighted with an aborted garment. I guessed it must have been picked clean by seagulls, but what had done for it in the first place, and why had it been left here, like some warning?
I shuddered to imagine Penny or Ralph seeing this (I was in no doubt that they would consider me a dreadful person for leaving it in full view of them, or anybody else who should come this way), so I toed it off the causeway, into a rock pool where the crabs could undress it further at their leisure.
I went on my way, struggling up the hill, negotiating potholes and puddles, cursing the painful, self-inflicted wounds in my palms, until I reached a level surface where I could get a little speed up. It was hard work. The blanketing of many years played its part, but I had to accept that I was not the fit man of even ten years previously.
Eventually I hit a downward slope and freewheeled for the best part of a mile, pretty much all the way to the harbour. I slowly levered myself off the bicycle and locked it against the drainpipe of the harbour inn. My shirt was glued to my back, and I was having trouble calming my breath down. I felt a little panicky for a moment, wondering if I really ought to have been doing this at all, considering my reasons for being here in the first place, but gradually the dials all started to swing back to normal.
There were no suitable hiding places to get away from the wind that hadn’t already been snaffled by families and lovers, so I decided I had deserved a drink and settled myself in a corner of the inn’s beach-view patio.
I had an interminable wait until some young thing with more tattoos than wit came to take my order. I asked for a pint of bitter and a newspaper, and she trotted off, leaving me to wonder if she’d poured herself into those skin-tight satin trousers.
An hour passed pleasantly enough. Putting some distance between me and the fort (and, by extension, the hare and Mr. Gluckmann) had done wonders for my mood. The beer had something to do with it too, I’m sure, but for the first time I felt as though I was relaxing, that I didn’t feel the need to be anywhere or to be doing something. Time was redundant (other than helping me to decide when I should order my lunch) and there were no appointments to fret about. I wrote a couple of postcards to my sons, then leaned back to try to allow as much vitamin D as possible into my skin, and opened the newspaper.
People began to drift into the patio and the tables filled up around me. I asked the waitress for fish and chips and took a break from the cryptic crossword to watch the activity on the beach.
The breakwater was host to a bunch of teenagers in swimming costumes performing bombs and swan dives off the edge. Older people wrapped up against the chill stood along the railing, watching, shaking their heads. It was busy, despite the cold—fun-seekers desperate to eke out one last day of larks on the beach, no matter how distant and weak the sun was becoming.
The waves creamed against the bank of dark, damp sand, pushing before it a line of debris—driftwood, seaweed—that failed to settle. It was turning out to be a lovely day, but my eye was drawn to a haze of dark cloud far away to the east. There was rain in that—you could tell by the faintest teased-away columns within it, darker, grainier, like pleats of shadow in a lace wedding dress.
Ah, Clarissa, you would have loved it here.
I ordered another drink; my meal came. It was good and fresh, if a little on the large side for a person whose appetites had shrunk somewhat in the preceding decade. But as I got to the end of what I presumed was a fillet of battered cod, my teeth crunched into something that was certainly no shell of deep fried flour and egg. Its taste contained the sharp tang of rot. Discreetly, I spat the mouthful back on to my plate, and with a fork I prodded the bolus of semi-chewed fish.
I was appalled to see a mangled conglomeration of piscine body parts reveal themselves on its tines. There were fish-bones, but these were black and oily; an eyeball, larger than one might expect from a cod, made opaque by the process of cooking, and most horrible of all, a fractured beak from an octopus, with a tiny green, decayed fish trapped within. Whatever had happened, this beast had been caught and killed while it was in the process of consuming a meal. Lord only knew why the chef hadn’t seen it while he was battering fillets in the kitchen.
I pushed the plate away and pressed a napkin to my lips. It’s all right, I thought to myself. I didn’t swallow any of that.
The first spots of rain came down, as if in sympathy with my mood. That rain front had whipped in double-quick to dissolve the furthest curve of the beach—about half a mile away—and send packing, in an ecstasy of flapping towels, the people from the sand.
The waitress returned and I told her what had happened. She seemed unimpressed by my story—more put out by the fact that I had regurgitated my meal. She cleared the table without the merest hint of remorse and asked me if I wanted anything else.
“Just the bill,” I retorted, and turned my attention back to the breakwater in time to see a man and woman locking their bikes against the railing, while a young boy of around three or four leaned against the lowest bar. I felt my guts loosen.
I’ve always hated heights, especially seeing others display a fearlessness of them such as those old photographs of men hopping around girders at the top of unfinished skyscrapers in New York.
The divers on the breakwater had decided to call it a day—one of them, a teenage girl in flip-flops and long blonde hair seemed lost, she walked up and down it as if she’d misplaced something.
The bay was emptying quite rapidly now as the grey deepened and the rain—an unpleasant driving mist—enveloped the whole of the beach and set the parasols fluttering. Lights came on.
The little boy fell.
I felt the thump of his body through my feet as he hit the sand. My heart skittered. He was still for a while, but then he began to move like someone coming out of deep sleep—squirming, flinching. His parents were still absorbed by their lock and had not seen the accident occur.
The sea was coming in—I could see it lapping at the boy’s feet, like something tasting him. The image—prompted by the unpleasant affair of my meal—disgusted me and I leapt upright, gesturing wildly at the couple on the breakwater. Nobody else had witnessed this. The boy could be lying there with a punctured lung, drowning on his own fluids while Mum and Dad bickered about how best to lock a bicycle to a post.
Now the boy found his voice and let out a cry. He was clearly hurt. The sound did not reach his parents. I hurried down the steps from the patio to the sand, ignoring the bleats of the waitress who had returned to present me with my bill.
As I rounded the first set of steps, a shoulder of the patio blocked out the view to the beach. In my peripheral vision—I was concentrating on my descent and did not want to follow the boy into A&E with a pratfall of my own—I saw a diabolically large shadow separate itself from the surface of the sea, close to where he
was lying. It was muscular, gunmetal grey, carrying the sheen of something alive and purposeful.
I began to scream and shout, hollering like a madman, and the faces of the boy’s parents were tilted down to me as I rounded the final flight and reached the sand. As I had disturbed them from their obsession with the bike lock, so I had disturbed whatever it was that had risen from the sea.
Now there was just the boy, getting wetter as the tide foamed at his back. I yelled at the dozy idiots to get down to their poor child, and they whirled around like pantomime actors on a stage. Mum started wailing; Dad shouted “Billy! Billy!” in a desperate voice. I suddenly felt bad about raising my voice at them. A momentary loss of concentration and a child’s life was in the balance.
I got to him first, moments before the father.
“Don’t touch him!” I snapped, and he favoured me with a gaze to cook the skin off my bones. “He might have a bad break. If you lift him up it could be catastrophic.”
“He was right next to me,” the father said. “He was an inch away.”
“It’s these railings,” I said. “Fine for you and me, but they look like a climbing frame for children.”
We crouched by Billy and managed to get him to tell us if he hurt anywhere. It soon became apparent that the relatively dampening effect of the sand and a child’s natural “bounciness” had resulted in little more than a bad fright.
“I’ll call an ambulance, if you want me to,” I offered.
“It’s okay,” said the mother, as she rocked her son and repeatedly kissed the top of his head. “We’ll drop by the hospital and get him seen to.”
They thanked me fulsomely and traipsed up to the main road. I felt the occasional pang I got when I see children playing, or being cuddled by their parents. A wishfulness, a wistfulness. The faint memory of tender, unconditional, filial love. And then it was gone, and I turned back to the ocean, which was being whipped into large combers of seething white.
I stared into it for some time, trying to convince myself that what I’d seen was strange shadow-play, a collision of the last glint of sunlight and the enveloping dark of the squall.
“You’re bitter,” a voice said.
“I beg your pardon?” I turned to see the waitress standing a few feet away, holding out a piece of paper.
“Your bitter,” she said. “You just have to pay for your bitter. No charge for the food.”
* * *
I went back to my bicycle and unlocked it. As I pedalled towards the village centre I caught sight of the blonde teenage girl wrapped in a dark blue towel. She was standing at the end of the breakwater and calling in a tiny, fragmented voice that was pulled this way and that by the wind: “Harry? Harry?”
V
MRS. COTTERHAM • THE POLICE MAKE SOME ENQUIRIES • AN INVITATION
I stopped in the village to buy stamps and to send my postcards. I spotted Mr. Gluckmann while I waited in the post office queue—he was talking animatedly to a man in a dark suit who held a clipboard. They were standing in front of an estate agent’s window. Mr. Gluckmann was wearing a long, grey raincoat, a hat, scarf and gloves. He looked like someone trying to conceal himself, and I wondered if that was what I would do if I suffered his skin condition or whether I would consider it a problem for the public to have to deal with. My attention was gradually drawn away from that strange old man to a conversation two women ahead of me in the queue were having about the Fisherman. Something had happened on the island, it transpired, that morning.
One of the women, whose hair was so white you’d be forgiven for expecting a light dusting of talc to spring from it at every movement she made, was pale with shock. “On your own doorstep,” she said. “Who would countenance such a thing?”
The other woman was more fatalistic. “Why should we be immune? You hear people say ‘Why me, why us?’ all the time and you have to ask the question, ‘Why not me, why not us?’”
Apparently a group of teenage revellers having a bonfire near the cliffs on the southern edge of the island had spotted a woman in the rocks, close to the airport. Her bright orange umbrella marked her out among the black teeth where she had been discarded, otherwise she might never have been discovered at all. A post-mortem was being carried out that afternoon, but everyone was convinced she would be the next notch on the Fisherman’s tally stick.
I was feeling tired by now; within an hour it would be dark and I didn’t want to be navigating those treacherous roads with the small, ineffectual lights on the bike. I set off back along the coastal road thinking of Clarissa, and the events of the day, and wondering if, after all, my dead wife would have liked it here.
Thanks to the weird, cruel way of the world, my journey back was just as tough and rigorous as the first leg, the wind having changed direction to beat me in the face as I fought against that long incline to the disintegration of the road, where the slope would turn in my favour, but the poor surface would keep me at a crawl until I reached the causeway. The light had turned gloomy by then, full of mud, so I could no longer see a clear break between the sky and the sea.
I returned the bike to the lean-to inside the gate and hurried back to my room, hoping to avoid the Cotterhams, but Alastair must have been waiting for me because he shot out of the door, his face wild, his normally well-groomed hair antic.
“Have you seen Penny?” he demanded. He said it in such a way as to make any denial seem redundant, yet deny it I had to.
“Not since this morning, when I left,” I said. “Why?”
Alastair studied me as if I must be lying, concealing something, and I thought: The Fisherman. No. No. Surely not.
“She’s missing,” he said. “She left this morning to go for a walk, clear her head—she suffers from these awful migraines—and I told her I would have breakfast ready for her return, but an hour went by, then two, and she didn’t come back.”
“Have you contacted the police? The coast guard?”
He looked suddenly close to tears, as if my saying this had somehow confirmed what he was fearing. “No,” he said. “I wanted to wait as long as possible. I wanted to ask you…” His voice tapered off, perhaps as he realised how pathetic he sounded.
“Allow me,” I said, and swept past him, into the Officer’s Quarters. Ralph was sitting on one of the sofas, his knees drawn up to his chin, trying not to allow the little boy through, but failing miserably. He looked alarmed, forlorn, lost. I tried to smile at him, but the muscles in my face were still stiff from the journey—I must have looked anything but optimistic to him; he turned away.
I managed to get through to the island police office and informed them briefly of the situation and our whereabouts. They told me to stay where we were, and that an officer would be with us within the half-hour.
I went straight to my suitcase and pulled out the small bottle of Jura I’d brought with me to help keep the nip from my bones. I poured two glasses and handed one to Alastair. He eyed the whisky with suspicion but swallowed it down in one gulp. He sighed. “Thanks,” he said. “That was good.”
I sipped my own drink in a more leisurely fashion, perched on the edge of the kitchen table while he sat with Ralph and tried to comfort him. When I’d finished I pulled on my coat and went up to the gate and peered through the hatch, trying to make out any kind of movement on the causeway, or the hills leading off in the direction of Bray. After about five minutes I saw headlights following the ruined road towards the causeway.
Ambient light, most probably from the fort’s floodlights, picked out the reflective stripes on the side of the car. I unlocked the gate as it pulled up in the small parking space and two uniformed officers climbed out.
We didn’t speak. I merely led the way and indicated Alastair’s whereabouts. The officers thanked me with the kind of sad, formal smile that heralds no good news.
I listened, a hand over my mouth, as the officers went through the motions. We’re very sorry to have to inform you… terrible news… your wife, Penelope, w
as found this morning… she died as a result of her injuries…
It was decided that he and Ralph should leave immediately in order to identify the body. I told Alastair that I would help in any way possible and he thanked me, though I imagine he barely heard what I said to him. I gave Ralph a pat on the back and told him to be strong and look after his dad, but he was in a terrible state, unable to hold the tears back any longer.
What a terrible, terrible ordeal. Losing my own wife had no bearing on this whatsoever. We’d both had time to come to terms with what was happening and Clarissa’s demise, though premature, was as near to what one might term a ‘good’ death as one could hope. I wished Alastair and his boy might find some form of closure. It was pale comfort, I suppose, but at least a body had been found. If the rocks had not snagged her, she might never have been seen again.
I had another glass of whisky in a bid to ward off the maudlin thoughts jostling for attention, and to blunt my senses against the realisation that I was now alone in this remote outcrop. My skin prickled with the thought of Mr. Gluckmann emerging from the water like a sponge that has been chewed beyond recognition. I thought I still smelled the residue of our meeting the previous night in the tips of my fingers and felt my gorge rising. I managed to reach the bathroom before I was sick, and I was bizarrely grateful for the hot stink of whisky fumes to mask that other odour.
Back in the Soldier’s Quarters I showered and brushed my teeth, and fell into a weak, feverish sleep invaded by Gluckmann, who was once again naked, his skin looped and pale like something molten. What looked like organic baskets were stitched into the flesh around his waist and slung over his shoulders like bandoliers. Each basket was topped by a scalp, to keep covered whatever lay inside.
He came out of the shadows and the moonlight, where it touched him, made him translucent, and I discerned shadowy joins in the skin, like little blisters. They shimmered in a peristaltic motion, chasing each other over the immense surface area of his body like shoals of fish jinking this way and that to confuse a pursuer. The ‘baskets’ I noticed were translucent too. Each contained something craven in attitude, hunched in on itself as if trying to hide. Something limbless, yet budding, with a network of veins feeding, and leaving, a soft, red heart beating at the centre. Something unformed, vaguely human, yet riddled with teeth and spines.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 17