Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  “Someone jumped. I saw it. He climbed over the rail and let go.”

  Dr. John didn’t even blink. Martin had to step hard on the impulse to slap him silly.

  “It’s something to do with the pill, isn’t it? The green pill, and the girl who gave it to you. Don’t try to deny it, I saw her with whoever it was that jumped.”

  Dr. John stood still and silent, face slack, shoulders slumped. Or not entirely still—one hand was slowly and slyly creeping towards the breast pocket of his denim jacket. Martin knocked it away and reached inside the pocket and pulled out the green pill and held it in front of Dr. John’s face.

  “What is this shit? What does it do to you?”

  Dr. John’s eyes tracked the pill as Martin moved it to and fro; his hand limply pawed the air.

  “Don’t be pathetic,” Martin said. He thrust the pill into the pocket of his jeans and steered Dr. John into the living room and put him to bed on the sofa. Then he went out to the phone box at the end of the road, dialled 999 and told the operator that he’d seen someone jump from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and hung up when she asked for his name.

  * * *

  When Martin went into the living room the next morning, Dr. John was fast asleep, curled into the back of the sofa and drooling into the cushion he was using as a pillow. After Martin had shaken him awake and poured a cup of tea into him, he claimed not to remember anything about the last night, saying, “Man, I was definitely out of my head.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. Dr. John drank a mug of tea and devoured three slices of white bread smeared with butter and sprinkled with brown sugar while Martin told him about the boy in the bathtub, the people lined up at the railing above the Avon Gorge, and the girl who had escorted the man to the midpoint of the bridge, how she’d embraced him, how he’d stepped into thin air. Dr. John wore a funny little smile, as if he knew the secret that would make sense of everything, but when Martin had finished he shrugged and said, “People jump off the bridge all the time. They queue up to jump off. The police have to comb pieces of them out of the trees, scrape them off the road, dig them out of the mud...” He patted his pockets. “Got any fags?”

  Martin found a packet his girlfriend had left behind.

  “Silk Cut? They’re not real cigarettes,” Dr. John said, but tore off the filter off one and lit it and sat back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  Martin was tired of trying to crack Dr. John’s bullshit insouciance, but decided to give it one more try. He leaned across the table and said as forcefully as he could, “Someone jumped off the bridge. I saw it.”

  “I believe you, man,” Dr. John said, still smiling that sly little smile.

  “If you don’t remember anything at all, you really were out of your head. And I thought there wasn’t a pill or powder you couldn’t handle.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t remember anything, man. I just don’t remember any of the shit you saw. That was just the pattern on the veil that hides the true reality of things. That hides what’s really going on.”

  “So what was really going on?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  “I want to understand.”

  “Are you worried about me, man? I’m touched.”

  “I saw someone throw himself off the suspension bridge. The girl who gave you that pill, the one in the white dress, was right there with him when he jumped. I think that guy got high on whatever it is she’s peddling, just like you did, and she persuaded him to jump. I think she killed him. That’s what I saw. How about you?”

  Dr. John thought for a few moments. “What you have to understand is that the green shit doesn’t do anything but put you in the right frame of mind. It takes you to the beach, and after that it’s up to you. You have to wade out into the sea and give yourself up to it of your own free will. And if you can do that, the sea takes you right through the bottom of the world into this space that’s deeper and darker than anywhere you’ve ever been. The womb of the world, the place where rock and water and air and everything else came from.”

  He developed a thousand-yard stare for a moment, then shook himself and smiled around the cigarette, showing his broken tooth.

  “It’s very dark and quiet, but it isn’t lonely. It’s like the floor of the collective unconscious. Not in the Jungian sense, but something deeper than that. You can lose yourself in it forever. You dissolve. This is hard, trying to explain how it is to someone who doesn’t believe a word of it, but haven’t you ever had that feeling when everything inside you and everything outside you, everything in the whole wide world, lines up perfectly, just for a moment? I remember when I was a kid, this one day in summer. Hot as it is now, but everything lush and green. Cow parsley and nettles growing taller than me along the edges of the road on the way up to the common. Farmers turned cows and sheep out to graze there, and the grass was short and wiry, and warm beneath you when you lay down, and the sun was a warm red weight on your closed eyelids. You lay there and felt the whole world holding you to itself, and you heard a lark singing somewhere above you in the sunlight and the warm wind. You couldn’t see it, but it was singing its heart out above you, and everything dissolved into this one moment of pure happiness. You know what I’m saying? Well, if you take that feeling and make it a thousand times more intense and stretched that one moment out to infinity, it would be a little like where I went.”

  “Except that you were high. It didn’t really happen, you only thought it did.”

  Dr. John looked straight at Martin, smiling that sly smile, and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re just a tourist, man. A day-tripper. You might have ventured onto the beach a couple of times, you might even have dipped a toe into the sea, but that’s as far as you’ve ever dared to go. Because as far as you’re concerned, drugs are recreational. Something you do for fun.”

  Martin felt a sharp flare of anger. He’d seen something awful, he believed that he had risked his life to rescue Dr. John, and his only reward was scorn and derision. “If you want to fuck yourself up,” he said, “do a proper job and score some heroin from that guy who works for those gangsters who beat you up.”

  “I found something better,” Dr. John said. “We all did. Something we didn’t know we needed until we found it. You don’t need it, man. That’s why she turned you down. Even if you got hold of some of her stuff and got off on it, you wouldn’t be able to take the next step. You wouldn’t be able to surrender yourself. But we knew where it would take us before we’d even seen it. We ached for it. It’s our Platonic ideal, man, the missing part we’ve been searching for all our lives.”

  “One of your little gang killed himself last night. He threw himself off the suspension bridge, right in front of my eyes. He committed suicide. Is that what you want?”

  “Suicide? Is that what you think you saw?”

  Dr. John looked straight at Martin again. For a moment, Martin glimpsed the worm of self-loathing that writhed behind the mask of his fatuous smile and flippant manner. He looked away, no longer angry, but embarrassed at having glimpsed something more intimate than mere nakedness.

  “Something wants our worship,” Dr. John said, “and we want oblivion. It isn’t hard to understand. It’s a very simple deal.”

  “If you take another of those pills, you could be the next one off that bridge,” Martin said.

  Dr. John stood up. “You have your nice little flat, man, and your nice little shop and your nice little gigs with loser pub rock bands. You have a nice little life, man. You’ve found your niche, and you cling to it like a limpet. Good for you. The only problem is, you can’t understand why other people don’t want to be like you.”

  Martin stood up too. “Stay here. Crash out as long as you like. Get your head straight.”

  Dr. John shook his head. “My friends are waiting for me.”

  “Don’t go back to the river,” Martin said, b
ut Dr. John was already out of the door and clumping away downstairs.

  * * *

  Martin shut up shop early that afternoon and took a walk up to the observatory. Children ran about in the sweltering heat, watched by indulgent parents. People were sunbathing on suncrisped grass. There was a queue at the ice-cream stall by the entrance to the observatory tower. Someone was flying a kite. It was all horribly normal, but Martin was possessed by a restless sense that something bad was going to happen. As if a thunderstorm hung just beyond the horizon, waiting for the right wind to blow it his way. As if the world was suddenly all an eggshell above a nightmare void. He drifted back through Clifton village and ended up in the Coronation Tap and drank five pints of Directors and ate one of the pub’s infamous mystery pies, and at closing time walked back to the suspension bridge and thrashed through bushes to the top of the rise.

  There they were, leaning at the rail in the warm half-dark, staring into the abyss.

  None of them so much as glanced at Martin as, his heart beating quickly and lightly, his whole skin tingling airily, he walked across the grass. They leaned at the rail and stared with intense impassivity at the gorge and the floodlit bow of the suspension bridge. The two women on either side of Dr. John didn’t even blink when Martin tried to pull him away, tugging one arm and then the other, trying to prise his grip from the rail, finally getting him in a bear-hug and hauling as hard as he could. As they staggered backwards, a gull skimmed out of the dusky air and bombed them with a pint of hot wet birdshit. It stank like thousand-year-old fish doused in ammonia, and stung like battery acid when it ran into Martin’s eyes. Half-blind, gasping, he let go of Dr. John and tried to wipe the stuff from his eyes and face, and another gull swooped past, spattering him with a fresh load, clipping him with the edge of a wing. Martin sat down hard, saw more gulls circling in the dark air, one of them much bigger than the rest. One dipped down and swooped towards him, its wings lifted in a V-shape. His nerve gave out then, and he scrambled to his feet and ran, had almost gained the shelter of the bushes when the bird hit him from behind, ripping its claws across his scalp and knocking him down. He was crawling towards the bushes, blinded by blood and birdshit, when another gull smashed into him, and the world swung around and flew away like a stone on the end of a string.

  * * *

  When Martin came to, the swollen disc of the full moon was setting beyond the trees on the other side of the gorge. Its cold light filled his eyes. The person standing over him was a shadow against it, reaching down, clasping his hand and helping him sit up.

  “Christ,” Simon Cowley said. “They really worked you over.”

  Martin’s face and hair were caked in blood and gullshit. His skin burned and his eyes were swollen half-shut. He gingerly touched the deep lacerations in his scalp, winced, and took his hand away.

  “Gulls,” he said.

  “Vicious little fuckers, aren’t they? Especially the big one.”

  “What do you know about it? And what are you doing here?”

  “I came here after your hippy friend spiked my beer. I woke up from a horrible dream and found myself standing at the rail over there, in the middle of a whole bunch of sleepwalkers. I’ve been coming back every night since. And every night someone has gone over the bridge into the river.” Simon’s long blond hair was unwashed and he stank of sweat and sickness. His eyes were black holes in his pale face. A khaki satchel—an old gas mask carrier—hung from his shoulder. He looked around and said in a hoarse whisper, “I think there’s something in the river. I think it swam in from the sea on the last high tide, it’s been trapped here ever since because the drought lowered the level of the river. It’s been living on what they give it.”

  “They worship it,” Martin said, remembering Dr. John’s ravings.

  “I think it draws them here and makes them jump off the suspension bridge. I think it eats them,” Simon said, “because no one has reported finding any bodies. You’d think, after at least three people jumped off the bridge in as many days, one of them would have washed up. I went down there yesterday in daylight, and took a good look around. Nothing. It devours them. Snaps them up whole.”

  Martin got to his feet. Heavy black pain rolled inside his skull. His eyes were on fire and his lacerations felt like a crown of thorns. He said, “We should call the police.”

  “You saw what was down there. I know you did because I saw you here last night.”

  “I saw something. I don’t know what it was.”

  “You think the police can do anything about something like this?” Simon cocked his head. “You hear that?”

  “I hear it.”

  People were chanting, somewhere below the edge of the gorge.

  “It’s beginning,” Simon said.

  “What’s beginning?”

  “You can help me or stay here, I don’t care,” Simon said, and ran towards the path that led down the face of the gorge.

  Martin chased after him. Everything was black and white in the moonlight. Bleached trees and boulders and slabs of rock loomed out of their own shadows. The day’s heat beat up from bare rock. The black air was oven-baked. Martin sweated through his T-shirt and jeans. His feet slipped on sweat inside his Doc Martens. Sweat stung his swollen eyes, his lacerated scalp. He caught up with Simon at the beginning of a steep smooth chute of limestone that had been polished by generations of kids using it as a slide. At the foot of the gorge, people were crossing the road, shambling towards the girl in the white dress, who stood at the rail at the edge of the river. A passing car sounded its horn, swerved past them.

  Simon didn’t look around when Martin reached him. He said, “You see her? She’s the locus of infection. She’s been missing for two weeks, did you know that? I did some research, looked at back copies of the Evening Post for anything about people jumping from the bridge, and there she was. I think she jumped off the bridge and the thing in the river took her and changed her and sent her out to bring it food.”

  Below, people were climbing over the guard rail at the edge of the road. The river shone like a black silk ribbon between its wide banks of mud. White flakes—gulls—floated above one spot.

  “We have to stop it right now,” Simon said. “It’s high tide tonight. I think it wants to take them all before it goes back to sea.”

  “All right. How are we going to stop it?”

  “I’m going to blow it up. I stole two sticks of dynamite from work. Taped them together with a waterproof fuse. You distract them and I throw the dynamite and we run.”

  “Distract them?”

  People were slogging across the mud towards the gyre of gulls. They had started up their chant again.

  “Shout at them,” Simon said. “Throw rocks. Try to take back your hippy friend, like you did just now. Whatever you like, as long as you get them to chase you. Then I’ll chuck the dynamite in the river, right at the spot under those gulls.”

  “Suppose they won’t chase me?”

  In the high-contrast glare of the moonlight, Simon’s grin made his face look like a skull. “I’ll chuck it in anyway.”

  “You’re crazy. You’ll kill them all.”

  “They’re already dead,” Simon said, and turned away. Martin grabbed the canvas satchel, but Simon caught the strap as it slid past his wrist. For a moment, they were perfectly balanced, the satchel stretched between them; then a gull swooped out of the black air. Simon ducked, staggered, put his foot down on thin air and fell backwards. Martin sat down heavily, the canvas satchel in his lap, heard a rolling crackle as Simon crashed through bushes, saw the pale shape of the gull fall away as it plummeted after him.

  Martin got to his feet and slung the satchel over his shoulder and went on down the path, fetched up breathless at the bottom, his headache pounding like a black strobe. An articulated lorry went past in a glare of headlights and a roar of hot wind and dust. Martin ran across the road, clambered over the guardrail, and dropped to a swale of grassy mud, breaking through a dry
crust and sinking up to his knees.

  He levered himself out and stumbled forwards. He could hear the tide running in the river, smell its rotten salty stink. Inky figures stood along the edge of the black water on either side of the girl’s pale shadow. Gulls swooped around them. Their hands were raised above their heads and they were chanting their nonsense syllables.

  Iä! Iä! Iä-R’lyeh!

  There was a sudden splashing as hundreds of fish leapt out of the water, shards of silver flipping and thrashing around the line of men and women. Martin ran down a shallow breast of mud, shouting Dr. John’s name, and something huge breached the river. Light beat up from it in complex labial folds, rotten, green, alive. Gulls swirled through the light and flared and winked out. Blazing faultlines shot across the mud in every direction; fish exploded in showers of scales and blood.

  The people were perfectly silhouetted against the green glare. They were still chanting.

  Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

  Martin staggered towards them, feet sinking into foul mud, swollen eyes squeezed into slits, and locked his arms around Dr. John’s neck. Dr. John fought back, but Martin was stronger and more desperate, and hauled his friend backwards, step by step. The light began to pulse like a heartbeat. A virulent jag cut straight in front of Martin and Dr. John. Mud exploded with popcorn cracks. Martin fell down, pulling Dr. John with him, and the giant gull swooped past, missing Martin’s face by inches. Dr. John tried to pull away and Martin clung to him with the last of his strength, watched helplessly as the misshapen bird swept high through the throbbing green glare and turned and plummeted towards them like a dive bomber.

  Someone gimped past—Simon Cowley, raising the broken branch he’d been using as a crutch. The bird screeched and slipped sideways, but Simon threw his make-shift spear and caught it square in its breast, and it exploded in a cloud of feathers and rotten meat. Something like a nest of snakes was thrashing in the centre of the light. A thick, living rope whipped across the line of men and women, knocking them down like nine-pins, sweeping them into the river. Simon threw himself flat as another ropey tentacle cracked through the air. For a moment it flexed above Martin, its tip crusted with feathery palps and snapping hooks, dripping a thin slime, and then it sinuously withdrew. The light was dying back into itself. Water rushed into the place where something huge and unendurable had opened a brief gap in the world, bubbled and steamed, and closed over.