The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  And knowing her meaning, how could he refuse her?

  “Very well,” the old man answered. “But my dear, this thing you’re worrying about, it is – it – it has to be – a horrible disease, and nothing more. So don’t go mixing fantasy and reality, for that way lies madness.”

  And after a moment’s thought he told her the rest of it . . .

  “The stories I’ve heard . . . well, they were incredible. Legends born of primitive innocence and native ignorance both. You see, with regard to Dagon, those islanders had their own myths which had been handed down from generation to generation. Their blood and looks being so debased, and the taint having such a hold on them – probably since time immemorial – they reasoned that they had been created in the image of their maker, the fish-god himself, Dagon.

  “Indeed they told those old sea captains just such stories, and also that in return for worshipping Dagon they’d been given all the wealth of the oceans in the abundance of fish they were able to catch, and in the strange golden alloy, which was probably washed out of their mountains in rainy-season streams. It would be the native priests, of course – their witch doctors, priests of Dagon or his ‘esoteric order’ – who secretly worked the gold into the jewellery whose remnants we occasionally see today.

  “But the modern legend – the one you’ll hear in Innsmouth and its environs – is that in return for the good fishing and the gold, the natives gave of their children to the sea, or to man-like beings who lived in the sea: the so-called ‘Deep Ones’, servitors of Dagon and other alleged, er, ‘deities’ of the deep, such as Great Cthulhu and Mother Hydra. And the same legend has it that Innsmouth’s sea captains, in their lust for alien gold, the favours of mainly forgotten gods out of doubtful myths, and the promise of life everlasting, followed suit in the sacrifice of their young to Dagon and the Deep Ones. Except they were not sacrifices as such but matings! Thus in both legends, it became possible to blame the ‘Innsmouth look’ or taint on this miscegenation: the mingling of Deep One and clean human blood. But of course no such matings took place because there’s no such thing as a merman! Nor was there ever, but that didn’t stop a handful of the more degenerate Innsmouth people from adopting the cult, as witness that weathered, white-pillared hall dedicated to the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

  “Which leaves only the so-called ‘epidemic’ of 1927–28 . . .

  “Well, seventy years ago our society was far less tolerant. And sad to say that when stories leaked out of Innsmouth of the sheer scale of the taint – the numbers of inbred, diseased and malformed people living there – the federal government’s reaction was excessive in the extreme. But there’s little doubt that it would have been the same if AIDS had been found there in the same period: panic, and a knee-jerk reaction, yes. And so there followed a vast series of raids and many arrests, and a burning and dynamiting of large numbers of rotting old houses along the waterfront. But no criminal charges were brought and no one was committed for trial; just vague statements about malignant diseases, and the covert dispersal of a great many detainees into various naval and military prisons.

  “Thus old Innsmouth was depopulated, and these seventy-odd years later its recovery is still only very sluggish. There is, however, a modern laboratory there now, where pathologists and other scientists – some of them Innsmouth people themselves – continue to study the taint and to offer what help they may to the descendants of survivors of those frenzied federal raids. I worked there myself, however briefly, but it was disheartening work to say the least. I saw sufferers in every stage of degeneration, and could only offer the most basic assistance to any of them. For among the doctors and other specialists there . . . well, the general consensus is that there’s no hope for a cure as yet for those with the Innsmouth blood. And until or unless the taint is allowed to die out by gradual dispersion or depletion of that diseased foreign gene pool, there shall always be those with the Innsmouth look . . .”

  Jilly was as calm as Jamieson had ever seen her now – too calm, he thought – like the calm before a storm. Her eyes were unblinking and had a distant quality, but her look was reflective rather than vague or vacant. And finally, after a few long moments of silence, the old man prompted her, “What now, Jilly? Is something still bothering you?”

  Her gaze focussed on him and she said, “Yes. I think there is one more thing. You said something about everlasting life – that the Innsmouth seafarers had been promised everlasting life if they embraced the worship of Dagon and these other cult figures. But . . . what if they reneged on the cult, turned back from such worship? You see, toward the end George frequently rambled in his sleep, and I’d often hear him say that he didn’t want to live forever, not like that. He meant his condition, of course. But I can’t believe – no, no, I can! I do! – that he believed in s-s-such things. So, do you think – I mean, is it p-p-possible – that my husband was once a m-member of that old Innsmouth c-c-cult? And could there be anything of t-truth in it? I mean, anything at all?”

  Jamieson shook his head. “Anything to it? Only in his mind, my dear. For you see, as George’s condition worsened, it would have been more than a merely physical thing. He would have been doing what you are doing: looking for an explanation where none exists. And having had to do with those cultists – and knowing the legends – he might have come to believe that certain things were true. But as for you, you mustn’t. You simply mustn’t!”

  “B-b-but that tainted blood,” she said, her voice a whisper now, as if from far away. “His blood, and Geoff’s blood, and . . . and w-w-what of Anne’s?”

  “Jilly, now I want you to listen.” The old man took hold of her arms, grasping her very firmly. And of all the lies or half truths he had told her in the past half hour, the next would be his biggest deceit of all. “Jilly, I have known you and Anne – especially Anne – for quite a while now, and from my knowledge of the Innsmouth taint, and also from what I know and have seen of your daughter, I would be glad to stake my reputation on the fact that she is as normal as you or I.”

  At which she sighed, relaxing a little in her chair . . .

  And taking that as his signal to depart, Jamieson stood up. “I must be off,” he said. “It’s late and I’ve some things to do before bed.” Then, as he made his way to the door, he said: “Do give my regards to Anne, won’t you? It’s a shame I missed her – or perhaps not, since we needed to have our talk.”

  Jilly had followed him – rather stumblingly, he thought – and at the door said, “I really d-d-don’t know how to thank you. My mind feels so much more at ease now. But then it always does after I-I-I’ve spoken with you.” She waited until he’d got into his car, and waved him a shaky goodbye before closing the door.

  Pulling away from the house, the old man noticed an almost furtive flicker of movement in the drapes of an upstairs window. It was Anne’s bedroom; and very briefly he saw her face – those huge eyes of hers – in the gap of partly drawn-aside curtains.

  At which he wondered how long she had been awake; even wondered if she had been asleep! And if not, how much she’d overheard. Or had she perhaps already known it all . . .?

  The long winter with its various ailments – Anne White’s laryngitis, and Doreen Tremain’s flu – merged slowly into spring; green shoots became flowers in village gardens or window boxes; lowering skies brightened, becoming bluer day to day.

  But among these changes were others, not nearly so natural and far less benign, and old Jamieson was witness to them all.

  He would see the beachcomber – “young Geoff”, indeed, as if he were just another village youth – shambling along the tidemark. But he wasn’t like other youths, and he was ailing.

  Jamieson watched him in his binoculars, that tired shambler on the shore: his slow lurching, feet flip-flopping, shoulders sloping, head down and collar up. And despite that the weather was much improved, he no longer went out to sea. Oh, he looked at the sea – constantly pausing to lift his ugly head and gaze out across that
wide wet horizon – gaze longingly, the old man thought, as he attempted to read something of emotion into the near-distant visage – but the youth’s great former ability in the water, and his untried but suspected strength on dry land, these seemed absent now. Plainly put, he was in decline.

  The old man had heard rumours in the village pub. The fishing was much improved but Tom Foster wasn’t doing as well as in previous years; he’d lost his good luck charm, the backward boy who guided his boat to the best fishing grounds. At least, that was how they saw it, the other fishermen, but it was Tom Foster himself who had told the old man the truth of it one evening in the Sailor’s Rest.

  “It’s the boy,” he said, concernedly. “Um’s not umself. Um says the sea lures um, and um’s afeared of it. Oh, um walks the shore and watches all the whitecaps, the seahorses come rollin’ in, but um ain’t about ter go aridin’ on ’em. I dun’t know what um means, but um keeps complainin’ as how um ‘ain’t ready’, and doubts um ever will be, but if um ‘goes now’ it’ll be the end of um. Lord only knows where um’s thinkin’ of goin’! And truth is, um sickens. So while I knows um’d come out with me if I was ter ask um, I won’t fer um’s sake. The only good thing: um lies in the bath a lot, keeps umself well soaked in fresh water so um’s skin dun’t suffer much and there be no more of them fish-lice.”

  And the leathery old seaman had shrugged – though in no way negligently – as he finished his pint, and then his ruminations with the words, “No more sea swimmin’, no more fish-lice – it’s as simple as that. But as fer the rest of it . . . I worries about um, that I do.”

  “Answer me one question,” the old man had begged of Foster then. “Tell me, why did you take him in? You had no obligation in that respect. I mean, it wasn’t as if the youth – the child – was of your blood. He was a foundling, and there were, well, complications right from the start.”

  Foster had nodded. “It were my woman, the missus, who took ter um. Her great-granny had told of just such young ’uns when um were a little ’un out in the islands. And Ma Foster felt fer um, um did. Me too, ’ventually, seein’ as how we’ve had um all this time. But we always knew who um’s dad were. No big secret that, fer um were here plain ter see. Gone now, though, but um did used ter pay um’s share.”

  “George White gave you money?”

  “Fer Geoff’s upkeep, yes.” Foster had readily admitted it. “That’s a fact. The poor bugger were sellin’ off bits of precious stuff – jewell’ry and such – in all the towns around. Fer the lad, true enough, but also fer um’s own pleasure . . . or so I’ve heard it said. But that’s none of my business . . .”

  Then there was poor Jilly White. She, too – her health, – was very obviously in decline. Her nightmares were of constant concern, having grown repetitive and increasingly weird to the point of grotesque. Also, her speech and mobility were suffering badly; she stuttered, often repeated herself, occasionally fell while negotiating the most simple routines both in and out of doors. Indeed, she had become something of a prisoner in her own home; she only rarely ventured down onto the beach, to sit with her daughter in the weak but welcome spring sunshine.

  As to her dreams:

  It had been a long-drawn-out process, but Jamieson had been patient; he had managed to extract something of the nightmarish contents of Jilly’s dreams from the lady herself, the rest from Anne during the return journey from a language lesson trip into St Austell. Unsurprisingly, all of the worst dreams were centered upon George White, Jilly’s ex-husband; not on his suicide, as might at least in some part be expected, but on his disease: its progression and acceleration toward the end.

  In particular she dreamed of frogs or the batrachia in general, and of fish . . . but not as creatures of Nature. The horror of these visitations was that they were completely alien, gross mutations or hybrids of man and monster. And the man was George White, his human face and something of his form transposed upon those of the amphibia and fishes alike – and all too often upon beings who had the physical components of both genera and more! In short, Jilly dreamed of Deep Ones, where George was a member of that aquatic society!

  And Anne White told of how her mother mumbled and gibbered, gasping her horror of “great wet eyes that wouldn’t or couldn’t close”; or “scales as sharp and rough as a file”; or “the flaps in George’s neck, going right through to the inside and pulsing like . . . like gills when he snorted or choked in his sleep!” But these things with regard to her mother’s nightmares weren’t all that Anne had spoken of on the occasion of that revealing drive home from her language lesson. For she had also been perfectly open in telling Jamieson:

  “I know you saw me at my window that time when you brought her pills and spoke to my mother at length, the night you told her about Innsmouth. I heard you start to talk, got out of bed, and sat listening at the head of the stairs. I was as quiet as could be and must have heard almost everything you said.”

  And Jamieson had nodded. “Things she probably wouldn’t have spoken of if she’d known you were awake? Did it . . . bother you, our conversation?”

  “Perhaps a little . . . but no, not really,” she had answered. “I know more than my mother gives me credit for. But about what you told her, in connection with my father and what she dreamed about him, well, there is something I’d like to know – without that you need to repeat it to her.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You said that you’d seen those sick Innsmouth people, ‘in every stage of degeneration’. And I wondered . . .”

  “. . . You wondered just what those stages were?” The old man had prompted her, and then gone on: “Well, there are stages and there are states. It usually depends on how they start out. The taint might occur from birth, or it might come much later. Some scarcely develop the Innsmouth look at all . . . while others are born with it.”

  “Like Geoff?”

  “Like him, yes.” Again Jamieson nodded. “It rather depends on the strength of the Innsmouth blood in the parents . . . or in at least one of them, obviously. Or in the ancestral blood line in general.”

  And then, out of the blue and without any hesitation, she’d said, “I know that Geoff is my half-brother. It’s why my mother let’s us be friends. She feels guilty for my father’s sake – in his place, I mean. And so she thinks of Geoff as ‘family’. Well, of a sort.”

  “And you? How do you think of him?”

  “As my brother, do you mean?” She had offered an indecisive shake of her head. “I’m not really sure. In a way, I suppose. I don’t find him horrible, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, of course not, and neither do I!” The old man had been quick to answer. “As a doctor, I’ve grown used to accepting too many abnormalities in people to be repulsed by any of them.”

  “Abnormalities?” Anne had cocked her head a little, favouring Jamieson with a curious, perhaps challenging look. And:

  “Differences, then,” he had told her.

  And after a moment’s silence she’d said, “Go on, then. Tell me about them: these states or stages.”

  “There are those born with the look, as I’ve mentioned,” he had answered, “and those who gradually develop it, some of whom stay mostly, well, normal-looking. There are plenty of those in Innsmouth right now. Also, there is always a handful who retain their, er, agreeable – their acceptably, well, human – features for a great many years, changing only towards the end, when the metamorphosis occurs very rapidly indeed. At the hospital where I worked, some of the geneticists – Innsmouth people themselves – were trying to alter certain genes in their patients; if not to kill off the process entirely, at least to prolong the human looks of those who were likely to suffer the change.”

  “ ‘Human-looking’, and ‘metamorphosis’, and ‘geneticists’.” Anne had nodded, thoughtfully. “But with those words – and the way you explained it – it doesn’t sound so much a disease as a, well, a ‘metamorphosis’, yes; and that is your own word! Like a pupa into a bu
tterfly, or rather a tadpole into a frog. Except, instead of a tadpole . . .”

  But there she’d frowned, broken off and sat back musing in her seat. “It’s all very puzzling, but I think the answers are coming and that I’m beginning to understand.” Then, sitting up straight again until she strained against her safety belt, she had said. “But look – we’re almost home!” And urgently turning to stare at Jamieson’s profile: “We’re through the village and there are still some things I wanted to ask – just one or two more, that’s all.”

  At which the old man had slowed down, allowing her time to speak, and prompting her, “Go on then, ask away.”

  “This cult of Dagon,” she had said then. “This religion or ‘Esoteric Order’ in Innsmouth – does it still exist? I mean, do they still worship? And if so, what if someone with the look or the blood – what if he doesn’t want to be one of them – what if he reneges and . . . and runs away? My mother asked you much the same question, I know. But you didn’t quite answer her.”

  “I think,” Jamieson had said then, bringing his vehicle to a halt outside the Whites’ house, “I think that would be quite bad for this hypothetical person. What would he do, if or when the change came upon him? With no one to help him; none of his own kind, that is.”

  Anne’s mother had come to the door of the house, and stood there all pale and uncertain. But Anne, getting out of the car, had looked at the old man with her penetrating gaze, and he had seen that it was all coming together for her – and that indeed she knew more than her mother had given her credit for . . .

  In the second week of May things came to a head.

  The first handful of tourists and early holidaymakers were in the village, staying at two or three cheap bed-and-breakfast places; and these city folk were making their way down onto the beaches each day, albeit muffled against the still occasionally brisk weather.