Suddenly gibbering, Henry released me and turned his attention on the twin pillars of blackly tossing, undulating filth, slime and alien jelly as the advancing creatures formed more huge, slithering, soulless and half-vacant eyes in addition to the many they already had, and came flowing upon him. He fired once, twice, three times… until the hammer clicked metallically, first on a dead round, and once again, but hollowly, on an empty chamber. And finally, cursing, Henry hurled the useless weapon directly into the tarry protoplasm of one of that awesome pair of nine-foot nightmares. Then, as if noticing for the first time just how close they were, he turned and made to run or stagger away from them… but too late!
Moving with scarcely believable speed, they were upon him; they towered over him to left and right, putting out ropey pseudopods to trap Henry’s spindly arms. And closing with his thin, smoking, desperately vibrating body, they slowly but surely melted him, sucking him into themselves and burning him as fuel for the biological engines that they were…
As his agonised shrieking tapered and died, along with Henry himself, and as the smoke and gushing steam of his catabolism rose up from the feeding creatures, the loathsome fetor of Henry Chattaway’s demise might have been almost as sickening as the live smell of his executioners; but in combination, overwhelming the already rancid air to burn like acid in my nostrils even though I had moved well away, the two taints together were far more than twice as nauseating.
And I was glad that it was finally over, for my sake if not for the old man’s…
In backing away from all this I had come up against a different kind of body with a smell which I could at least tolerate; indeed I even appreciated it. The Shoggoth-herder looked at me rather curiously for a moment, his almost chinless face turned a little on one side. But then as he sniffed at me and recognised my Innsmouth heritage, my ancestry, he further acknowledged my role in these matters by turning away from me and once more taking command of the Shoggoths.
Left to my own devices I shrugged off a regretful, perhaps vaguely guilty feeling and set about climbing the stairway with the tall treads. This was hard work indeed, for I was already weary from my journey through the Underground with old man Chattaway and his suitcase full of impotent batteries.
But up there, high overhead, I knew the ovens would also be hard at work. And long or short pig, what difference did that make when I was this hungry? Hadn’t men eaten fish, and in France frogs, too? But the word from others I had spoken to was that this appears to be a problem with changelings such as myself, changelings who—while waiting for their change, when at last they, too, can go down to the water—hunt humans: sooner or later they begin to sympathise, even empathise with the hunted.
However, and despite the greater effort, I soon began to climb faster. For also up there were the cages and other habitats… and at least one lovely teenage girl; a girl called Dawn, who had never known a man—or for that matter a Deep One—or not until comparatively recently, anyway. A great shame, that there were others more or less like me up there, but I expected she would still be very fresh.
And, so that I wouldn’t fall victim to mistaken identity on the way up, I commenced chanting: “Ph’nglui gwlihu’nath, Bgg’ha Im’ykh I’ihu’nagl fhtagn…!” And surprising me even as I sang, there it was again: that oh-so-faint feeling of guilt!
But what the hell, and I shrugged it off. For after all, it was like I had told Henry: certain kinds of men can become accustomed—can get used—to almost anything.
Yes, and not only men…
AFTERWORD
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
RANDY BROECKER was born and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Inspired by the pulp magazines and EC comics he read as a child, his first published artwork appeared in Rich Hauser’s seminal 1960s EC fanzine, Spa-Fon.
Many years later, a meeting with acclaimed publisher Donald M. Grant at the second World Fantasy Convention eventually led in 1979 to The Black Wolf and his first hardcover illustrations. Since then his work has appeared in books produced by PS Publishing, Robinson Publishing, Carroll & Graf, Fedogan & Bremer, Cemetery Dance, Underwood-Miller, Sarob Press, Pumpkin Books, American Fantasy, Highland Press and other imprints on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was Artist Guest of Honour at the 2002 World Horror Convention and is the author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated study Fantasy of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History from Collector’s Press, which also formed part of a three-in-one omnibus entitled Art of Imagination: 20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy.
The artist has long been an admirer of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. His works have taken him to picturesque Innsmouth on more than one occasion, about which he has this to say: “The people of Innsmouth have been most kind to me over the years and I’ve enjoyed using them as models, although—and Lovecraft knew this—the ‘Innsmouth look’ as he referred to it, can be a bit hard to nail down on paper. There is, quite frankly, a tendency to over-exaggerate, which I’d like to believe I’ve avoided with my work this time around. I only hope they are as pleased with the results as I am.
“Whether embraced by the Innsmouth folk or not,” he adds, “these illustrations are dedicated to my late brother Jay—a small token for showing me the way not only to Innsmouth, but other fantastic locales as well.”
Broecker was also one of the contributing artists to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this new edition of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth features additional illustrations that were not included in the Fedogan & Bremer hardcover.
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RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Bad Thoughts, Think Yourself Lucky and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.
His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).
PS Publishing recently published the novellas The Pretence and The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, which attempts to reconceive some of the author’s early Lovecraftian ideas and develop them, along with the definitive edition of that early Arkham collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Also available from the same publisher is a volume of all the Campbell–Derleth correspondence, edited by S. T. Joshi.
Now well into his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
“I started imitating Lovecraft more than fifty years ago,” reveals Campbell. “Soon I learned to subsume his example—his careful sense of structure, his ambition to reach for awe—and mostly did without his Mythos, which in any case was largely constructed by later writers, too often to the detriment of what he was trying to achieve. He meant his inventions to suggest more
than they made explicit, but the rest of us filled in so many gaps that the whole thing became as over-explained as the Victorian occultism he wanted to leave behind. Over the decades I’ve tried to reclaim some of his original vision, not least in my novel The Darkest Part of the Woods, which took The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a model of how to do without his Mythos. I hope ‘The Winner’ also gives some sense of his vision without needing explicit references.
“I’ve been in pubs as unnerving as the one in this story, and perhaps they’ve lodged in my shadowy subconscious. The worst was in Birkenhead—a pub where as soon as you walked in you felt as if you’d announced your Jewishness at a David Irving book launch.”
Campbell’s early story ‘The Church in the High Street’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth, and the author’s ‘Raised by the Moon’ is included in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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ADRIAN COLE was born in 1949 in Devon, where he still lives. He is the author of twenty-five novels and numerous short stories, writing in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, sword & sorcery and horror.
His first books were published in the 1970s—“The Dream Lords” trilogy—and he went on to write, among others, the “Omaran Saga” and the “Star Requiem” series, as well as writing two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.
More recently, he has had several books published by Wildside Press, including the “Voidal” trilogy, which collects all the original short stories from the 1970s and ’80s and adds new material to complete the saga. The same imprint has also published the novel Night of the Heroes, an affectionate celebration of the world of pulp fiction, as well as Young Thongor, which Cole has edited and which includes the previously uncollected short “Thongor” stories of Lin Carter.
The author’s latest SF novel is The Shadow Academy from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, with an audio version available from Audible. His short stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and he has written and performed a number of parodies of the genres he loves at various conventions in the past.
As the author explains: “‘You Don’t Want to Know’ is the first story I wrote about Nick Nightmare, the hard-boiled private eye, most of whose adventures pit him against various villains from Mythos terrain.
“Combining the droll style of Philip Marlowe, the shoot-’em-up no-nonsense energy of Mike Hammer and the bizarre grotesquery of H. P. Lovecraft, the Nick Nightmare stories are intended to be a celebration of the old pulps and their hyper-active, madcap world.”
A further tale, ‘Nightmare on Mad Gull Island’, was published in the fourth edition of Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos from Spectre Press, while Nick Nightmare Investigates is a new collection of tales from The Alchemy Press/Airgedlámh Publications. Both publications are illustrated by Jim Pitts.
Adrian Cole’s story ‘The Crossing’ appears in Shadows Over Innsmouth.
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AUGUST WILLIAM DERLETH (1909–71) was a major figure in the literary and small-press publishing world. An amazingly prolific Wisconsin regional author (known for his “Sac Prairie Saga”), essayist and poet, he is best remembered today as an author, editor and publisher of weird fiction (Lovecraftian and otherwise).
He made his debut in Weird Tales at the age of seventeen with a story entitled ‘Bat’s Belfry’, and most of his own macabre fiction has been collected by Arkham House—the imprint that Derleth founded in 1939 with Donald Wandrei to perpetuate the work of their friend and colleague H. P. Lovecraft—in such volumes as Someone in the Dark, Something Near, Not Long for This World, Lonesome Places, Mr. George and Other Odd Persons (as by “Stephen Grendon”), Colonel Markeson and Less Pleasant People (with Mark Schorer), Harrigan’s File, Dwellers in Darkness and In Lovecraft’s Shadow.
As a widely respected anthologist, he edited Sleep No More, Who Knocks?, The Night Side, The Sleeping and the Dead, Dark of the Moon, Night’s Yawning Peal: A Ghostly Company, Dark Mind Dark Heart, The Unquiet Grave, When Evil Wakes, Over the Edge, Travellers by Night, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Dark Things, amongst many other titles.
Derleth began corresponding with Lovecraft around the mid-1920s. “You have the real stuff,” the author wrote to his young protégé in 1930, “and with the progress of time it seems to me over-whelmingly probable that you will produce literature in a major calibre.”
Following Lovecraft’s untimely death, Derleth developed various fragments and outlines (reputedly) discovered amongst the author’s posthumous papers into Cthulhu Mythos-inspired pastiches, which can be found in such novels and collections as The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others, The Mask of Cthulhu, The Trail of Cthulhu and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.
In 1962, he set out his own vision of the Mythos: “The deities of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos consisted first of the Elder Gods, which, though beyond mundane morality, beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’, were nevertheless proponents of order and thus represented the forces of enlightenment as against the forces of evil, represented by the Ancient Ones or the Great Old Ones, who rebelled against the Elder Gods, and were thrust—like Satan—into outer darkness.”
‘Innsmouth Clay’ is a “posthumous pastiche” which first appeared in the 1971 anthology Dark Things under only Lovecraft’s byline. When reprinted three years later in The Watchers Out of Time, it was properly identified as a collaborative effort between the two authors.
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JOHN STEPHEN GLASBY (1928–2011) graduated from Nottingham University with a honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for ICI in 1952 and worked for them until his retirement.
Around the same time, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of novels and short stories, producing more than 300 works in all genres over the next two decades, many under such shared house pseudonyms as “Rand Le Page”, “Berl Cameron”, “Victor La Salle” and “John E. Muller”. His most noted personal pseudonym was “A. J. Merak”. He subsequently published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade, the occult novel The Dark Destroyer, and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater.
More recently, Philip Harbottle compiled two collections of Glasby’s supernatural fiction, The Lonely Shadows and The Dark Boatman, while the author’s son, Edmund Glasby, edited The Thing in the Mist: Selected by John S. Glasby, collecting eleven of the author’s stories from Badger Books’ digest horror magazine Supernatural Stories.
Ramble House will publish a further collection of fiction selected from that magazine, along with a new volume of Glasby’s Mythos stories, Dwellers in Darkness and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Meanwhile, the author’s most ambitious Lovecraftian work, Dark Armageddon—a trilogy of novels that unify the “Cthulhu Mythos” and bring it to a climactic conclusion—is set to appear from Centipede Press.
A long-time fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, in the early 1970s the author also submitted a collection of Mythos stories to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but the publisher unfortunately died before the revised book could see print, and the manuscript was returned.
In his later years, Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein. ‘The Quest for Y’ha-Nthlei’—a direct sequel to Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—was written especially for Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, as was ‘Innsmouth Bane’, which first appeared in the short-lived H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, before finally being anthologised in this volume.
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BRIAN HODGE is the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written over 100 short stories, novelettes and novellas, plus five full-length collections.
Recent works include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both stand-alone novellas;
a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.
He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga, grappling, and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
As the author explains: “As many times as I’ve read ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, it never occurred to me, until I read it looking for ideas, that neither H. P. Lovecraft nor anyone in the prior “Innsmouth” anthologies had accounted for the prisoners taken during the 1928 raids on the town.
“I quickly became intrigued by what must have happened to them, and how they might well constitute the original precedent for the troubling, terrorism-era US policy of endless detention without due process.
“The anomalous ocean recording in ‘The Same Deep Waters as You’ was a real-world event that I’ve wanted to play with for years. In an irresistible coincidence, the Bloop was triangulated to have originated close to where Lovecraft located the sunken city of R’lyeh. A few weeks after I finished this story, NOAA announced that the sound was similar to the sonic profile of icebergs recorded in the Scotia Sea. They would know, although I’d love to learn more about how there would’ve been enough ice around Polynesia that August that its calving was heard for 3,000 miles.
“It’s more fun living in a world where this remains a mystery.”
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CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, The Red Tree and Blood Oranges. She has recently scripted a graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics, Alabaster, which continues the misadventures of her character Dancy Flammarion.
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