Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  * * *

  Eighteen months later, Martin was with his friends in the middle of the crowd coming out of the Watershed at the end of a Clash concert, his ears ringing and sweat turning cold on his skin under his ripped T-shirt and Oxfam jacket and straight-legged Levis 501s, when someone caught his arm and called his name. Martin turned, saw a guy in a black dufflecoat, short blond hair and a pinched white face, and after a couple of seconds recognised Simon Cowley.

  Martin told his friends that he’d catch up with them in the pub, and said to Simon, “I never thought you’d be into punk rock.”

  “I’m not really here for the music.”

  Martin grinned. He was still pumped up by the concert’s energy. “You missed something tremendous.”

  “I heard about your friend.”

  “Come to gloat, have you? Come to say ‘I told you so’?”

  “Actually, I came to say I’m sorry.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I also heard you gave up your shop, you joined a group, you have a record deal...”

  “Those people I was with? That’s the group. And the deal, it’s for a single with Rough Trade. Nothing major,” Martin said, “but we all had three-day hangovers after we signed.”

  “Still, a record deal.”

  “Yeah. How about you? I mean, I heard you broke up Clouds of Memory...”

  “I gave all that up.” Simon hesitated, then said, almost shyly, “Want to see something?”

  “You don’t look well, Simon. What have you been doing since...”

  Simon shrugged. “I’ve been working. I’ve been waking up every night from bad dreams.”

  “I get those too, sometimes.” But Martin didn’t want to talk about that; didn’t want to talk about anything to do with those awful days in that long hot summer. “Well, it was nice to run into you—”

  “I’d really like you to see this. Apart from me, you’re the only person who’ll understand what it means. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Only a minute, then,” Martin said, and with a sense of foreboding followed Simon to the quay on the other side of the Watershed. Black water lapped a few feet below the edge of the walkway, flexing its patchwork covering of chip papers and beer cans and plastic detergent bottles. Martin shivered in the icy breeze that cut across the water, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and said, “What are we looking for?”

  Simon put a finger to his lips, pointed at the water.

  They were like tadpoles grown to the size of late-term human embryos. They were pale and faintly luminous, with heavy heads and large, black, lidless eyes and small pursed mouths. Skinny arms folded under pulsing gill slits. Snakey, finned tails. They hung in the black water at different levels.

  Martin stared at them, little chills chasing each other through his blood, and whispered, “What are they?”

  “Ghosts, maybe. Or shells, some kind of energy cast off when, you know...”

  When the people had been taken. When they had been consumed. Snapped up. Devoured. No bodies had been found; fourteen people had simply disappeared, as people sometimes do. Most of them were like Dr. John, chancers on the edge of society, missed by no one but their landlords and dealers and parole officers. There’d been some fuss in the local news about a housewife and a schoolboy who’d both gone missing the same day, but no one had made the connection between the two, and the story soon slipped off the pages. And that might have been the end of it, except that six months later the flat below Dr. John’s was flooded; when he went to investigate, Mr. Mavros found Dr. John lying fully clothed in his overflowing bath, dead of a heroin overdose. Dr. John’s parents had disowned him long ago. Only Martin and Mr. Mavros had attended the cremation, and Martin had scattered the ashes off the suspension bridge. And that, he thought, really had been the end of it, except for the dreams. Except for these ghosts, pale in the black water.

  “I think they come for the music,” Simon said. “Or maybe for what the music does to people. A concert is a kind of collective act of worship, isn’t it? Maybe they feed on it...”

  There were six or seven or eight of them. They looked up at Martin and Simon through the water and the floating litter.

  “There used to be more,” Simon said.

  “Isn’t one of them sort of listing to the left?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

  Simon said, “I tried to catch one once. I borrowed a keep net from my dad. They slipped right through it.”

  Martin said, “Afterwards, I found one of those pills in my pocket.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “What would be the point?”

  He’d flushed it down the sink. It had dissolved reluctantly, frothing slimy bubbles like a salted slug and giving off a vile stink that had reminded him of gull-shit. Dr. John had been right: it hadn’t been meant for him. Dr. John and the others had been on the road to oblivion long before they’d been snared by the monster or old god or whatever it was that had been briefly trapped in the tidal mud of the Avon. If it hadn’t taken them, something else would: an unlit gas oven; a razorblade and a warm bath; a swan dive from the suspension bridge; an overdose.

  Martin had brushed against it and lived, but he’d been changed, no doubt about it. He’d given up his second-hand record shop and his nice flat with its convenient location and its view across the communal gardens towards the green breast of Jacob’s Hill, and moved into a squat with the rest of his new band. He was happy there and gave himself one hundred per cent to his music, even though he was pretty sure, despite the record deal, it wouldn’t last. But that didn’t matter. He was only twenty-six, for God’s sake. There was plenty of time to move on, to try something else.

  He stood with Simon in the dark and the chill wind and watched the ghostly things in the water fade away.

  “Sometimes I can almost hear them, you know?” Simon said. “I can almost understand what they’re trying to tell me.”

  “It might be an idea to try to forget about them.”

  Simon sighed, shivered inside his duffel coat, tried to smile. “I never thought I’d say this, but you’re probably right.”

  “Want to come and have a drink with me?”

  “I have to get the last bus home.” Simon had that uncharacteristic shy look again. “I’m getting married in a couple of months. My fiancée will be waiting up for me.”

  “Congratulations,” Martin said, and discovered that he meant it.

  “Maybe we’ll have that drink some other time,” Simon said, and they shook hands at the edge of the water and went their different ways into the city, into the rest of their lives.

  THE COMING

  by HUGH B. CAVE

  KEITH WALKER WAS one of five passengers in the Reverend Ralph Beckford’s station wagon that Sunday afternoon as it began its low-gear descent down The Devil’s Ladder into Deeprock Gorge. All the others had been present in the Reverend’s church that morning and heard him preach about the coming. Keith had not heard about it until he called on Jennifer Skipworth after the service.

  “Oh, now, come on,” he’d said when Jennifer told him what they planned to do. “You can’t be serious!”

  “We are serious.” The girl he was in love with stopped pacing her living room and faced him with her hands outstretched. “Keith, we are! Like the Reverend says, it’s all in Revelations if you’ll just take time to read between the lines. Darling, I’m not asking you to believe. Only to come with us.”

  “But why Deeprock Gorge?” Keith protested. “I went fishing there once with Mr. Powell”—Otis Powell was editor of the Innsmouth newspaper Keith worked for—“and it’s got to be the most Godforsaken place in the whole of Massachusetts. It’s even hard to get to.”

  “Howard has a house there.”

  “Oh.” There were some houses in the gorge, Keith remembered. Cabins, anyway. Maybe three or four of them, strung out along the banks of the stream. Weekend s
ummer camps, he guessed they were.

  “Howard Lindsay, you mean? The big guy who owns the paint factory?”

  She nodded. “He’s a deacon in our church.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you want to know who else is going?”

  “Well, if I’m going to be one of them,” Keith said. Which, of course, he would be, because he sure wasn’t going to let her go on any such crazy mission without him. He had long believed that most of the folks who went to Reverend Beckford’s church were a little daft. That they now believed Satan was about to take over the world didn’t surprise him.

  How they hoped to stop old Beelzebub from doing it did interest him, though, as a possible story for the paper. “You mean you’re going there just to pray?”

  “That’s right, Keith. To pray.”

  “Then why not in the church? Why Deeprock Gorge, of all places?”

  “Because Christ wrestled with Satan in a wilderness. Please, darling, try to understand.”

  She told him who would be going. Reverend Beckford, of course. Mary Sewell and her eleven-year-old son Davey. Howard Lindsay, who had recently bought the gorge, or at least the cabins in it, so his factory workers could use them weekends. “And, I hope, you. You will come, won’t you, Keith? It’ll only be for one night.”

  “Where you go, I go,” he told her.

  Jennifer lived with her parents in a house on the edge of town, and on the way back to his in-town bachelor apartment, Keith had stopped at the home of Otis Powell, his editor, and told Powell what was up. “It could be a pretty good story, don’t you think: Reverend Beckford convincing all those good people the Devil is coming to take us over, and some of them going into the wilderness to pray for help?” He would go anyway, he knew, even if Powell laughed at him. But Powell said yes, it could be a story, so go ahead and good luck.

  * * *

  The Devil’s Ladder behind them, the road along the river’s edge was no more than a pair of ruts through dark grey sand and rocks. At times Keith thought they wouldn’t get through. But there were tyre tracks, so other vehicles must have managed it, and presently, lo and behold, there was the cabin.

  He helped Jennifer with the food they’d brought, and the Sewells with their gear—because Mary Sewell weighed at least 250 pounds— and by the time he carried his own things into the cabin, the others were already in the bedrooms, getting set up for the night. What they should do, Reverend Beckford said, was have a bite of something to eat because it was already past five o’clock, and then get busy on what they’d come here for.

  There were two bedrooms in the place, along with a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a big front room with a fireplace. The Reverend, Howard Lindsay and Keith had one bedroom; Jennifer and Mary Sewell and Mary’s boy Davey had the other. The beds were cot-size bunks built into the walls.

  “Just what are you planning to do here, Reverend?” Keith asked while making up his bed. The Reverend was about fifty years old and easily six-foot-three but so skinny he might disappear through a floor-crack at any minute. A nice fellow, though, except he got so intense about things sometimes.

  “Pray,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t see. But you will, soon as we’ve eaten.”

  “There may be other people in some of the cabins along here,” Keith pointed out. “You plan on asking them to pray with us?”

  Howard Lindsay said, “Yes, some of my people are out here this weekend. I checked in town before we left.” Lindsay was a broadshouldered, brawny fellow, just the sort you’d expect to want a cabin in a wilderness. The paint factory he owned seemed to make him a good deal of money.

  “It’s a bit late to call on people this evening,” the Reverend said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Keith finished getting his bed ready and went into the kitchen, where Jennifer and fat Mary Sewell—Big Mary, folks called her—were starting supper. They’d brought along food already cooked, Jennifer explained, because they hadn’t known how much free time they might have with all the praying to be done. After lighting the propane stove so they could heat things, Keith turned on the faucet in the sink and reached for a glass to get himself a drink of water.

  “Use that,” Big Mary said, pointing to a plastic jug of store-bought water. “Deacon Lindsay says the river water’s clean and we’re crazy, but the way this poor world is headed, you can’t trust nothing any more.”

  Keith said okay and drank bottled water and then went out to sit on the back steps and think about the story he would write. Noting how dark it was getting, he looked at his watch, then held his wrist to his ear to make sure the watch was still running. In town, with daylight-saving time in effect, darkness would still be a long way off. But here in the gorge, with its high, sheer walls shutting out the light, the day was already dying. Made a fellow feel a bit strange, like he was in another world. There’d be a near-full moon tonight, though, he remembered. The gorge should be something to see with moonlight pouring down into it.

  He finished thinking and went back inside, where he helped set the table for a fine supper of Boston baked beans and ham and home-baked bread. After the Reverend asked a blessing that seemed a bit too long with everyone so hungry, they ate. Then the Reverend pushed his chair back and said, “We men ought to do the dishes, I expect, since you ladies did the cooking. But first let’s get started on what we came here for.”

  He led them out to the river’s edge, where it was almost totally dark now. Even the shallow, twenty-foot wide stream was more heard than seen as it rushed past over its bed of boulders. With the Reverend telling them what to do, they formed a circle and held hands. Then in his deep, throaty voice he began praying.

  “Lord, look down on this troubled Earth, please, and see what’s happening here. It isn’t pretty. All over this once-beautiful planet people are doing things they shouldn’t ought to be doing. Like polluting our rivers and lakes so we’ll soon be short of drinking water. And wantonly killing off whole species of the wonderful creatures you put here to share your bounty with us. Look, Lord, at how people are stupidly cutting down the forests we need to keep clean the air we breathe, and how they are further making the air unbreathable by poisoning it with smokestacks and automobile exhausts.

  “Lord, the few of us that see what’s going on and want to put a stop to it need your help now in the worst way. Yes, we do. By ourselves we can’t make much of a difference because we’re so outnumbered by those who don’t care. Take a good look at what’s going on down here, Lord. See for yourself the ever-greater numbers of people using drugs—especially young people. Note the drug-related murders and the child abuse. See the number of people openly admitting they’ve turned away from you and are worshipping Satan.

  “Lord, the Devil is on the warpath again, as you must know. We’ve got whole nations here that are stockpiling things like hydrogen bombs and planning to use chemical- and germ warfare against their innocent neighbours. It’s frightening, I tell you. It’s scaring the living daylights out of those of us who aren’t too blind or selfish to see what it’s likely to lead to. But Lord, you beat old Lucifer once before in a wilderness like this, and with your help we can whip him again. So look down on us here and tell us what to do, we beseech you. Tell us before it’s too late. Amen.”

  Reverend Beckford prayed along those lines for another half-hour or so, then opened his eyes. “There,” he said with a heavy sigh, “I’m sure we all feel some better already because we know He heard us. We can go inside now. But at daybreak we’ll talk to Him again.”

  When the men had done the dishes by lamplight, Howard Lindsay built a fire and the group sat by the fireplace, talking. Mary Sewell’s boy Davey played some hymns on a harmonica he’d brought along. The others exclaimed at how good he was and asked for more. Then the moon came up, filling the gorge with a shimmering mist of quicksilver, and Keith reached for Jennifer Skipworth’s hand.

  “How about a little walk?” Keith suggested.


  She smiled at him and they went out together, telling the others they’d soon be back.

  * * *

  The moonlight must have been responsible for what happened then. For more than two years Keith had known he was in love but hadn’t quite been sure he wanted to be tied down in marriage. After all, Jennifer Skipworth was a bit heavy on the church-going at times, even for Innsmouth, and even now, this expedition into Deeprock Gorge for a confrontation with Satan was on the spooky side. But before they had walked a hundred yards downriver he heard himself blurting it out. “Hey... why don’t you and I stop fooling around and get married, huh? Like soon, I mean.”

  Then before she could answer, the moonlight did something else. Just ahead of them, at the water’s edge, a stone moved. Or if not a stone, a living thing that looked like a stone. It suddenly turned itself into a beetle or bug or insect the size of a dinner plate and with a loud hissing sound went waddling into the water, where it vanished.

  Jennifer froze in her tracks and gasped, “What was that?”

  Keith forgot about wanting to be married. His fingers tightened their grip on her hand and he went slowly forward, one careful step at a time, pulling her after him, until they reached the place where the thing had been. Smelling something, he dropped to his knees, still cautiously, and sniffed at the empty pocket of black sand. It had an odour of—what? Spoiled meat?

  “Must have been some animal,” he said, rising. “A possum, maybe? But hurt, somehow. You want to go back?”

  Jennifer thought about it. He’d asked her to marry him. The stupid possum or whatever it was had interrupted her answer. She wanted to marry this man. She wanted to tell him so, right here in this wilderness with the moon pouring its blessing down on them. “Let’s go on a bit more,” she said.