I thought about the object I’d found in the cave. That weird, fishy book, if it could be called such a thing. I found myself thinking I was lucky to have thrown it back to the sea. It seemed unthinkable now that I might have taken it for good.
At the hatch in the gate I peered down towards the causeway and saw, with dismay, that the sea had completely cut me off from the mainland. Waves crashed up against the car park where I had trundled my cycle not twelve hours previously. I eyed that dark stretch feverishly, but there was nothing in it, or of it, that caught my attention. Nor would there be beyond limpets, seaweed and crabs. The most exotic thing found at these latitudes were conger eel and smooth-hound. Perhaps the odd seal.
I set my jaw against the weather and the water and drew an imaginary line under my fear. Come dawn, I would be shot of the place.
Turning back to the promise of warmth, I heard a sound under the racket of the sky and ocean that gave me pause. It sounded like crumbling masonry, but the walls here were sound as far as I could see. Rocks then? Peeling away from the cliff-face under scrutiny from the buffeting wind?
I tried leaning over the parapet in the courtyard fronting the quarters, but I could see nothing untoward. Then I remembered the Outpost, and the more expansive view the disintegrated walkway allowed of the bay. I put down my mug and clambered back up through the samphire to the narrow corridor and negotiated once more the mesh barriers and warning signs.
A shadow moved across the open doorway of that separated room.
I stared, barely able to breathe, and tried to convince myself I had not seen it. But then terrible sounds came to me from the black shadows of the open window and that gaping doorway. The tiny room ought not to have been able to produce the kind of acoustics that caused the sounds to carry, but here they came—moist, tearing noises. And beneath them, muttered, but with a kind of religious intensity, I heard words. They were words I’d never heard before—and never want to hear again—but I couldn’t replicate them here. They sounded foreign, wildly alien even, but somehow rooted to reality, an Earth I knew from folklore, or race memory or some-such.
Forgive me if I ramble, but it’s difficult for me to explain. I come from a modest background, a family that lived on the breadline for many years, after the hardships of World War II. I didn’t see a banana until I was in my teenage years. So this kind of peculiarity left me stunned, scared. It didn’t fit into any pattern I recognised.
Furthermore, I didn’t want to recognise. I wanted to block it out, forget it, refuse to acknowledge that anything like this could occur in a world I thought I’d got the hang of during my time in it. But I stood there and I listened and I cringed under the weight of those impossible words and the crimson sounds in which they were couched. There was injury and death and meanness in every plosive, fricative and aspiration.
Without realising it I had started crying. I felt like a child who had strayed into a room where grown-ups were fighting, or making violent love. I didn’t understand.
I began to edge back from the gap in the rock. I didn’t trust myself not to give away my position via some pathetic whimper, or pratfall.
I’d like to think, as I turned and plunged back towards that lockable fortified room, that cell of mine, that the stink coming off the waves was being pushed from Les Etacs, where the gannets turned the rock white in more ways than one, but I knew the odour was pulsing from the Outpost.
And I had to keep thinking of the smell, otherwise my mind would fasten on to the sight of something loose, like a grey sack, flopping across the doorway and being dragged away. A sack unfit for any kind of business, it was so full of holes. A sack, after all, though, yes. A sack it was.
I fought with the urge to try to escape, to cast my luck upon the depth of water on the causeway, and the hope that the current was not as keen as it looked. Come dawn, not three hours away, the waters would have retreated and I would be able to cross to the mainland and leave this wretched place for good.
I sat on my bed, fully dressed, gripping a bar from one of the loose bunk rails, my eyes glued to the handle of the door. I didn’t move for the rest of the night and, because the light came back to the room so stealthily, did not realise it was morning until, yawning, I felt my back crackle as if my spine had been taken from me during those cold, lonely hours, and replaced with a giant icicle. I was stiff all over, my neck bright with pain whenever I turned my head.
I put down the bar and went to the window, pulled back the curtains. Grey sky, grey sea. Les Etacs was engulfed with wings. The waves were topped with scimitars of foam, as if the sea were trying to copy the shape of the birds it stared at all day. Against my better judgement, I unlocked the door and stepped outside.
The wind was little more than playful this morning, exhausted from last night’s violence. I stared up at the little mound that prefaced the corridor to the Outpost and, though I desperately wanted to assuage my suspicion, my legs simply would not carry me back up there.
The beeping of a car horn.
I went back to my room and grabbed my packed suitcase. In that moment I felt my heart beating, but I was kidded into thinking it was a strong, healthy pulse—rather it was the flesh that carried it, grown weak over the decades, amplifying every pathetic rinse and suck of blood. Yet strangely, I was no longer afraid of that tardy muscle, sitting withered and wounded in its cage.
You are no threat to us…
I realised there were lots of other things to be fearful of in this world, and, in many ways, thank God, it had taken me a lifetime to discern it.
I shut the gate and struggled to remain upright on the slippery rock as I headed down to where the taxi was parked. The driver, my friend from Manchester, helped me to get the suitcase in the boot and then I was safely in the back seat and we were trundling over the causeway, now dry, the withdrawn tide collected in the surrounding rock pools, serene, all threat in abeyance; you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no such thing as high-tide here.
I felt in my pocket for the hag stone, momentarily panicked by the possibility I’d left it in the bed, but it was there, smooth and warm, and I clasped it as we headed towards the airport.
The heat in the taxi was thick and restful. I felt it seep into my bones.
Movement.
I jerked my head up and the muscles in my neck yelled at me. The sea was flat and relatively calm. No boats. But closer, down on a track beneath the road, what was that? It was Mr. Gluckmann, walking with his hands deep in his pockets, his wispy hair flailing around his head like seaweed lacing a submersed rock. He looked up as we slowly went by and his shaded eyes were shark-black. He smiled. I nodded, glad to see him fall behind us as the road improved and the taxi driver leaned on the accelerator.
Gluckmann raised his hand and I mirrored him. The hag stone was in my fingers. As I withdrew it, my view of the diminishing Gluckmann was impeded until he appeared within its hole, as he returned his arm to his overcoat pocket. And I had to close my eyes against the thrash in my chest and force myself over and over to believe that what I had seen in that ancient frame was skin and bone, and not the sinuous curve of a tentacle.
ON THE REEF
by CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
OSCAR WILDE (1891)
THERE ARE RITES that do not die. There are ceremonies and sacraments that thrive even after the most vicious oppressions. Indeed, some may grow stronger under such duress, stronger and more determined, so that even though devotees are scattered and holy ground defiled, the rituals will find a way. The people will find a way back, down long decades and even centuries, to stand where strange beings were summoned—call them gods or demons or numina; call them what you will, as all words only signify and may not ever define or constrain the nature of these entities. Temples are burned and rebuilt. Sacred groves are felled, but new trees take root and flourish.
And so it is with this r
agged granite skerry a mile and a half out from the ruins of a Massachusetts harbour town that drew its final, hitching breaths in the winter of 1928. Cartographers rarely take note of it, and when they do, it’s only to mark the location for this or that volume of local hauntings or guides for legend-trippers. Even the teenagers from Rowley and Ipswich have largely left it alone, and the crumbling concrete walls are almost entirely free of the spray-painted graffiti that nowadays marks their comings and goings.
Beyond the lower falls of the Castle Neck (which the Wampanoag tribes named Manuxet), where the river takes an abrupt south-eastern turn before emptying into the Essex Bay, lies the shattered waste that once was Innsmouth. More than half-buried now by the tall advancing dunes sprawls this tumbledown wreck of planks weathered grey as oysters, a disarray of cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks, the stubs of chimneys, and rows of warehouses and docks rusted away to almost nothing. But the North Shore wasteland doesn’t end at the shore, for the bay is filled with sunken trawlers and purse seiners, a graveyard of lobster pots and steel hulls, jute rope and oaken staves, where sea robins and flounder and spiny blue crabs have had the final word.
However, the subject at hand is not the fall of Innsmouth town, nor what little remains of its avenues and storefronts. The subject at hand is the dogged persistence of ritual, and its tendency to triumph over adversity and prejudice. The difficulty of forever erasing belief from the mind of man. We may glimpse the ruins, as a point of reference, but are soon enough drawn back around to the black granite reef, its rough spine exposed only at low tide. Now, it’s one hour after sundown on a Halloween night, and a fat harvest moon as fiery orange as molten iron has just cleared the horizon. You’d think the sea would steam from the light of such a moon, but the water’s too cold and far too deep.
On this night, there’s a peculiar procession of headlights along the lonely Argilla Road, a solemn motorcade passing all but unnoticed between forests and fallow fields, nameless streams and wide swaths of salt marsh and estuary mudflat. This night, because this night is one of two every year when the faithful are drawn back to worship at their desecrated cathedral. The black reef may have no arcade, gallery, or clerestory, no flying buttresses or papal altar, but it is a cathedral, nonetheless. Function, not form, makes of it a cathedral. The cars file down to the ghost town, the town which is filled only with ghosts. They park where the ground is firm, and the drivers and passengers make their way by moonlight, over abandoned railroad tracks and fallen telegraph poles, skirting the pitfalls of old wells and barbed-wire tangles. They walk silently down to this long stretch of beach, south of Plum Island and west of the mouth of the Annisquam River and Cape Ann.
Some have come from as far away as San Francisco and Seattle, while others are locals, haling from Boston and Providence and Manhattan. Few are dwellers in landlocked cities.
Each man and each woman wears identical sturdy cloaks sewn from cotton velveteen and lined with silk, cloth black as raven feathers. Most have pulled the hoods up over their heads, hiding their eyes and half-hiding their faces from view. On the left breast of each cape is an embroidered symbol, which bears some faint resemblance to the ikhthus, secret sign of early Christian sects, and before that, denoting worshippers at the shrines of Aphrodite, Isis, Atargatis, Ephesus, Pelagia and Delphine. Here, it carries other connotations.
There are thirteen boats waiting for them, a tiny flotilla of slab-sided Gloucester dories that, hours earlier, were rowed from Halibut Point, six miles to the east. The launching of the boats is a ceremony in its own right, presided over by a priest and priestess who are never permitted to venture to the reef out beyond the ruins of Innsmouth.
As the boats are filled, there’s more conversation than during the walk down to the beach; greetings are exchanged between friends and more casual acquaintances who’ve not spoken to one another since the last gathering, on the thirtieth of April. News of deaths and births is passed from one pilgrim to another. Affections are traded like childhood Valentines. These pleasantries are permitted, but only briefly, only until the dories are less than a mile out from the reef, and then all fall silent in unison and all eyes watch the low red moon or the dark waves lapping at the boats. Their ears are filled now with the wind, wild and cold off the Atlantic and with the rhythmic slap of the oars.
There is a single oil lantern hung upon a hook mounted on the prow of each dory, but no other light is tolerated during the crossing from the beach to the reef. It would be an insult to the moon and to the darkness the moon pushes aside. In the boats, the pilgrims remove their shoes.
By the time the boats have gained the rickety pier—water-logged and slicked with algae, its pilings and boards riddled by the boring of shipworms and scabbed with barnacles—there is an almost tangible air of anticipation among these men and women. It hangs about them like a thick and obscuring cowl, heavy as the smell of salt in the air. There’s an attendant waiting on the pier to help each pilgrim up the slippery ladder. He was blinded years ago, his eyes put out, that he would never glimpse the faces of those he serves; it was a mutilation he suffered gladly. It was a small enough price to pay, he told the surgeon.
Those who have come from so far, and from not so far, are led from the boats and the rotting pier out onto the reef. Each must be mindful of his or her footing. The rocks are slippery, and those who fall into the sea will be counted as offerings. No one is ever pulled out, if they should fall. Over many thousands of years, since the glaciers retreated and the seas rose to flood the land, this raw spit of granite has been shaped by the waves. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, and the early decades of the nineteenth—before the epidemic of 1846 decimated the port—the reef was known as Cachalot Ledge, and also Jonah’s Folly, and even now it bears a strong resembles to the vertebrae and vaulted ribs of an enormous sperm whale, flayed of skin and muscle and blubber. But after the plague, and the riots that followed, as outsiders began to steer clear of Innsmouth and its harbour, and as the heyday of New England whaling drew to a close, the rocks were re-christened Devil Reef. There were odd tales whispered by the crews of passing ships, of nightmarish figures they claimed to have seen clambering out of the sea and onto those rocks, and this new name stuck and stuck fast.
Late in the winter of 1927–28, the submarine U.S.S. 0-10 was deployed to these waters, from the Boston Navy Yard. The 173-foot vessel’s tubes were armed with a complement of twenty-nine torpedoes, all of which were discharged into an unexpectedly deep trench discovered just east of Devil Reef. The torpedoes detonated almost a mile down, devastating a target that has never been publicly disclosed. But the pilgrims know what it was, and that attack is to them no less a blasphemy than the destruction of synagogues and cathedrals during the firestorms of the two World Wars, no less a crime than the razing of Taoist temples by Chinese communists, or the devastation of the Aztec Templo Mayor by Spaniard conquistadors after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. And they remember the benthic mansions of Y’ha-nthlei and the grand altars and the beings murdered and survivors left dispossessed by those torpedoes. They remember the gods of that race, and the promises, and the rites, and so they come this night. They come to honour the Mother and the Father, and all those who died and who have survived, and all those who have yet to make the passage, but yet may. The old blood is not gone from the world.
Two are chosen from among the others. A box carved from jet is presented, and two lots are drawn. On each lot is graven the true name of one of the supplicants, the names bestowed in dreamquests by Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. One male and one female, or two female, or two male. But always the number is two. Always only a single pair to enact the most holy rite of the Order. There is no greater honour than to be chosen, and all here desire it. But, too, there is trepidation, for one may not become an avatar of gods without the annihilation of self, to one degree or another. And becoming the avatars of the Mother and the Father means utter and complete annihilation. Not physical death. Something far more dest
ructive to both body and mind than mere death. The jet box is held high and shaken once, and then the lots are drawn, and the names are called out loudly to the pilgrims and the night and the waters and the glaring, lidless eye of the moon.
“The dyad has been determined,” declares the old man who drew the lots, and then he steps aside, making way for the two women who have been named. One of them hesitates a moment, but only a moment, and only for the most fleeting of moments. They have names, in the lives they have left behind, lives and families and careers and histories, but tonight all this will be stripped away, sloughed off, just as they now remove their heavy black cloaks to reveal naked, vulnerable bodies. They stand facing one another, and a priestess steps forward. She anoints their foreheads, shoulders, bellies, and vaginas with a stinking paste made of ground angelica and mandrake root, the eyes and bowels of various fish, the aragonite cuttlebones of Sepiidae, foxglove, amber, frankincense, dried kelp and bladderwrack, the blood of a calf, and powdered molybdena. Then the women join hands, and each receives a wafer of dried human flesh, which the priestess carefully places beneath their tongues. Neither speaks. Even the priestess does not speak.
Words will come soon enough.
And now it is the turn of the Keeper of the Masks, and he steps forward. The relics he has been charged with protecting are swaddled each in yellow silk. He unwraps them, and now all the pilgrims may look upon the artefacts, shaped from an alloy of gold and far more precious metals, some still imperfectly known (or entirely unknown) to geologists and chemists, and some which have fallen to this world from the gulfs of space. To an infidel, the masks might seem hideous, monstrous things. They would miss the divinity of these divine objects, too distracted by forms they have been taught are grotesque and to be loathed, too unnerved by the almost inexplicable angles into which the alloy was shaped long, long ago, geometries that might seem “wrong” to intellects bound by conventional mathematics. Sometime in the early 1800s, these hallowed relics were brought to Innsmouth by the hand of Captain Obed Marsh himself, delivered from the Windward Islands of French Polynesia and ferried home aboard the barque Sumatra Queen.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 19