“Pollution?” said Needham. Kapenda thought of his camera, of the eye he held to his shoulder to see the world, about how he’d frame this discussion. One at each edge of the screen, he decided, in tight close-up, David’s opaque eye peering into the lens as Needham’s head bobbed back and forth, up and down, like a bird. Needham was a good producer and director because he stressed over the little details, but a bad drinking companion because he got like a terrier over tiny fragments of information.
“Pollution? Possibly, but no answer about the Earth is that simple. Why is the water rising so fast? So far? Mere geography, or something more? My point is that we look to the wrong places for answers, because the real answers have faces too terrible to contemplate,” said David and then stood. He was tall and solid, not fat exactly but well built, his waistcoat straining under the pressure from his ample belly.
“You’re looking in the wrong place, all of you.” And with that, nodding his thanks for the company, David turned and walked away. Kapenda grinned at the look of confusion on Needham’s face, saw that Plumb was heading back their way and quickly rose himself.
“I need a walk,” he said.
“A swim, surely?” said Needham, and he and Plumb laughed. Kapenda did not reply.
The pub was on a hill—it was why it remained mostly unaffected by the storms and the rising floodwater. The rain was coming in near-horizontal sweeps now, gusting along in cold breaths that made Kapenda shiver. Lightning crackled somewhere over the fields, followed by thunder that reminded him of David’s voice and cough. The forecasters were saying that this storm would burn itself out in the next day or so, but they’d said that before and been wrong. The previous week, the rains had continued through the period they’d confidently predicted would be dry, and the groundwater rose and rose. What had he come outside for? Not air, not even to be away from Needham and Plumb, not really.
Kapenda went down towards the lights that were strung out along Grovehill’s main street. Generators, housed in the nearby community hall, powered the lamps and rope barriers prevented him from getting to the water. Even at this time of night, news crews were clustered along the ropes, each filming or preparing for filming. He tried to look at the scene as though he was holding his camera—was there something here not about the floods but about the press response to it? No, that had been done.
There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he’d seen since this all started? He’d been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.
That was old. Every television station had those shots. He’d been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man’s civilised veneer was when set against nature’s uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dalí might have painted—a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.
What about the figures in the field?
Actually, the fields were a good starting point. They had flooded heavily and most were under at least four or five feet of water, but due to some quirk of meteorology or geography the water on them was sitting calm. Somewhere, he thought, somewhere there’s an image in that smooth expanse that I can use.
* * *
Kapenda waited until morning, and such light as came with sunrise, before investigating. He left a note for Needham, who likely wouldn’t be up until mid-morning anyway, and drove back along the roads towards the field. Through the windscreen, the road ahead of him moved like a snake, constantly surging and writhing.
The dark shape was in the first field he came to, drifting slowly along, spinning. Kapenda saw it through the tangle of hedgerow and stopped, climbing out into knee-high water and lifting his camera to his shoulder. He couldn’t see well, was too low, so climbed onto the vehicle’s door-sill and then higher, onto its roof. Was this the field where he had seen the figures? He thought it was, although there was no sign of them now. From his raised vantage-point, he saw what the shape was, and started filming.
It was a dead cow. It was already bloating, its belly swelling from the gases trapped within, and its eye peered at him with baleful solemnity. Its tongue trailed from its open mouth, leached to a pale grey by the water. Its tail drifted after it like an eel. There was another beyond it, he saw, and more beyond that. A herd, or flock, or whatever a group of cows was called, trapped by the water and drowned.
Drowned? Well, probably, but one of the further animals looked odd. Kapenda zoomed in, focusing as he did so. The dead creature’s side was a ragged mess, with strips of peeled flesh and hide along its flank exposing the muscles below. Here and there, flashes of white bone were visible. Its neck was similarly torn, the vertebrae visible through the damaged flesh. As he filmed, the creature spun more violently as a current caught it, slamming it into a tree-trunk; the collision left scraps of meat clinging to the bark. Kapenda carried on filming as the cow whirled away, watching as it caught on something under the water, jerked and then suddenly submerged, bobbing back up before vanishing again. A great bubble of air, so noxious Kapenda could smell it from his distant perch, emerged from where the cow had gone down.
It was as Kapenda climbed down from the roof that he saw the thing in the hedgerow.
It was jammed, glinting, into the tangle of branches and leaves about four feet from the ground. From the surface of the water, he amended. Leaving his camera in the jeep, he moved cautiously towards the glint, feeling ahead with his feet. The ground dropped away as he stepped off the solid surface of the road, the water rising against him. It came to his thighs and then his waist; he took his wallet and phone from his jeans and zipped them into his jacket’s inner pocket; they were already in plastic bank bags, sealed against the damp. Carefully, not wanting to slip, lose his footing and be washed away like the cows, he leaned into the hedgerow and pushed his arm into it. The thing was tantalisingly out of reach. He pushed in harder, felt his feet shift along the submerged earth and then he was over, falling into the water and going under.
It was cold, clenching his head in its taut embrace and squeezing. Kapenda kicked but his feet tangled into something—branches or roots—and were held fast. Something large and dark, darker than the water around him, banged into him, began to roll over him and force him further under the water. He wanted to breathe, knew if he opened his mouth he’d take in water and drown, and clenched his jaw. The thing on him was heavy, clamped onto his shoulder and was it biting him, Jesus yes, it was biting him and pushing him down and he was trapped, was under it and couldn’t shift it and then something grasped his other shoulder, hard, and he was pulled up from the water.
“No! No! Let him be!” It was David, hauling Kapenda from the water, pulling him back to the jeep. “What were you doing in the water? You could have bloody drowned!”
Kapenda collapsed to his knees, back into the water but held up by the jeep, and vomited. His breakfast came out in a soup of dirty liquid, the sight of it making him wretch even more.
“Are you okay? Do you need to go to the doctor? The hospital?” David was calmer now, more concerned than angry.
“No,” said Kapenda after a moment. “I think I’m okay. What was it?”
“A dead cow,” said David after a moment. “What were you doing, going into the water?”
“I saw something in the hedge,” said Kapenda, and it sounded ridiculous even as he said it. He managed to rise to his feet, using the side of the jeep as a support. Water dripped from him.
/> “Let me see then,” said David. The man looked paler in the daylight, as though he was somehow less there, his dead eye bulging from a face that was round and wan. Its milky iris peered at Kapenda. His other eye was dark, the sclera slightly yellowing. Was he a heavier drinker than he’d appeared the night before? He had patches of rough skin, Kapenda saw, dried and peeling.
There was a bike leaning against the back of the jeep and Kapenda was suddenly struck with the image of David cycling down the centre of the road, his front wheel cutting a ‘V’ though the water, his feet submerging and re-emerging with each revolution of the pedals, and it made him smile.
“Now, let’s see this thing you were prepared to drown to get,” said David, also smiling.
“Oh, I—” started Kapenda, about to say that it was still in the hedge, and then realised it wasn’t. He was holding it.
It was a small figure, made from some dull metal. It had a suggestion of legs and arms and a face that was nested in tentacles, its eyes deep-set and its mouth a curved-down arc. Was it an octopus? A squid? A long chain dangled from it, fine-linked and dully golden. More figures were hooked to some of the chain’s links, tiny things like toads with swollen genitalia and fish with arms and legs. David held the figure up by the chain, peering at it.
“What is it?” Kapenda asked.
David didn’t answer. Instead, he spun it, watching as it caught the pallid light. Its surface was smooth, but Kapenda had the impression it was the smoothness of age and wear, that the ghosts of old marks still lay under its skin. Finally, David spoke, muttering under his breath, words that Kapenda didn’t catch.
“Do you know what it is?” asked Kapenda. He was starting to shiver, the shock and the cold catching him. He wanted to go back to the hotel and dry off, warm up.
“Yes,” said David. “I saw one once, as a child, and I hoped not to see one again so soon. Still, I suppose it explains a lot.” He rubbed one of the patches of dry skin on his neck slowly.
“The water’s coming, my friend,” he said, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Its time is here again. Well, if you’re sure you’re okay to drive, I’ll leave you be. Take my advice, stay out of the water.”
“I will,” said Kapenda, “and thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” said David and coughed again, his own private punctuation. He winked his sightless eye once more and then went and mounted his bike, wheeling it around to point back to Grovehill. Moments later all Kapenda could see of him was his back, hunched over the handlebars as he went down the road. Behind him, tiny waves spread out across the water and then broke apart.
It was only when Kapenda got back into the jeep that he remembered the bite—sure enough, his jacket was torn in two semicircles, to the front and rear of his shoulder, and the skin below bruised but not broken. He got back out of the jeep to try and see the cow but it must have floated off, and the only thing to see was the flood, ever restless and ever hungry.
* * *
The house collapsed just after lunch.
They were filming at the rope barrier again, this time framing the talent against a shot down the street to show how the water wasn’t retreating. “Forecasters say that, with the recent rainfall, the water levels aren’t expected to recede until at least tomorrow, and if more rain comes it could conceivably be several days or more,” Plumb intoned. “Great sections of the South-West are now underwater, economies ruined and livelihoods and lives destroyed. Even today, we’ve heard of two more deaths, a woman and child who drowned in their lounge in the village of Arnold, several miles from here. Questions are being asked of the defences that the government installed and why the Environment Agency wasn’t better prepared. Here, the people merely wait, and hope.”
Kapenda waited until Plumb had done his turn, letting him peer meaningfully down the flooded street, before lowering the camera. One of the other crews had found a flooded farm earlier that day and had proudly showed their footage to everyone, of the oilslick forming across the surface of the water in the barn and around it as the water worked its way into the abandoned vehicles and metal storage canisters, teasing out the oil and red diesel they contained. The rainbow patterns had been pocking and dancing in the rain, and the image had been oddly beautiful; Kapenda had been professionally impressed, and privately jealous.
“Was that good?” asked Plumb, and then stopped and listened as the air filled with a dense rumbling, grinding sound like something heavy being pushed over a stone floor.
“The building’s gone,” someone shouted, a runner with a phone clamped to his ear, “it’s completely collapsed. The flood’s surging!”
As the man spoke, a fresh wall of water appeared between the furthest buildings, higher than those that had come before it, driven by the tons of brick and wood and belongings that had suddenly crashed into the flow. The wave was a dirty red colour, curled over like a surfer’s dream. Somewhere, it had picked up trees and a car, a table, a bed and other unidentifiable shapes—all of these Kapenda saw even as he was raising the camera. In the viewfinder, he caught the things in the water as they hit the buildings, saw the car crash through the window of a chemist, saw the bed hurtle into and buckle a lamp-post, saw bricks bounce and dip like salmon on their way to spawning, and then the wave was upon them.
He moved back, never stopping filming, cursing under his breath that he’d missed the actual collapse. Things churned through the water, dark shadows darting back and forward under the surface, their edges occasionally breaking through to the air only to roll back, splash their way under again.
The water level rose rapidly, submerging the makeshift barriers and eating away at the bottom of the hill. As Kapenda and Needham and the talent moved swiftly back, jostling in amongst the other film crews, cars were lifted out of the side streets and began to jolt through the water. One of the lights exploded as the water reached the electric cables, and the others shorted in a series of rapid pops that left behind ghost spots in Kapenda’s eyes and an acrid smell of smoke in the air. Moments later, one of the generators made a series of groaning sounds from inside the community hall and black smoke breathed out from the windows as it, too, shorted out. The police pushed the crowd back, followed all the while by the water.
* * *
By nightfall, Grovehill was lost. The rains, which had continued to fall all day, had finally abated as the light faded but the floodwater had continued to rise, submerging most of the houses and shops up to their roofs. In the pub, the conversation was subdued, slightly awed. Most of the crews had worked on weather stories before; Kapenda himself had been at Boscastle in 2004, filming the aftermath of the flash flood, but this was worse—it showed no signs of receding.
Two cameramen had died when the building collapsed. One had been caught in the initial surge of water, swept away like so much flotsam. The other, further down the torrent, had been on the edge of the bank when something turning in the water, the branches of an uprooted tree, it was supposed, had reached out and snagged him, lifting him from his feet and carrying him off. His talent, a pretty blonde stringer for a local news programme, had been taken off in shock talking about how the water had eaten the man.
“I saw one of those in Russia,” said a voice from behind him.
It was one of the other cameramen—Rice, Kapenda thought he might be called. Rice nodded at the thing Kapenda had pulled from the hedge, sitting on the table by his glass of beer.
“Russia?” asked Kapenda
“I was in Krymsk in 2010 and in Krasnodar,” said Rice, “back in 2012, when the flash flood killed all those people. We found a few of those around the port in Krymsk and in the fields about Krasnodar. We did a segment about them, but it was never shown.” He picked up the figure and dangled it, much like David had done, eying it.
“It’s almost identical,” he said. “Strange.”
“What is it?”
“We never found out, not really. I always assumed it was some kind of peasant magic, some id
ol to keep the floods away. If that’s what it was, it didn’t work though, the damn things were always where the water was at its highest. I found one hanging from a light fitting in the upper room of a school that was almost completely submerged.” He put the thing back on Kapenda’s table.
“What happened to your segment?”
“Got archived, I suppose,” said Rice. “Pretty much what we expected. I didn’t mind, not really. Russia was a nightmare, and I had bigger things to worry about than whether the piece I filmed got shown.”
“Really?”
“Really. It was chaos, thousands of people made homeless, streets full of mud and water and corpses. In Krymsk, everything got washed into the Black Sea, and the harbour was blocked with debris for weeks after. The local sea-life was well fed, though.”
“Jesus,” said Kapenda.
“Yeah,” said Rice. “You’d see them, dark shapes in the water, and then some floating body would suddenly vanish. The official estimate for Krymsk was one hundred and seventy dead, or thereabouts, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t far higher though. I had a friend covered the Pakistan floods, was in Sindh and Balochistan, and he told me there were things like that there as well, hanging from the trees just above the flood-line.”
“The same things?”
“Yeah,” said Rice again. “And I’ll tell you one other thing that’s odd.”
“What?”
“That old woman that died in the flood at St. Asaph the other week? That drowned in her home? There was one hanging outside her house, and one outside the house of the mother and child that drowned yesterday.”
“What? How do you know?”
Rice merely smiled at Kapenda. I have my sources, the smile said, and I’m keeping them secret. “Keep it safe,” he said as he turned and went back to the bar, “you never know when you might need protection against the water.”
* * *
Needham was in a bad mood.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 32