Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  The egg-shaped object had an odd centre of gravity. It shifted under his hands and he had to struggle to control it. Dangerously off-balance, he bumped into Eileen, almost knocking her down. “God, I’m sorry.” He wheezed, and ridiculously felt on the verge of tears. “There, see? A signature.” He played his fingers over the back of the egg where a line of squiggles had been pressed into its surface.

  “Are you sure that’s a signature, hon? It’s pretty hard to read.”

  “You saw Dr. Linden’s handwriting on your prescription didn’t you? No better than this. In fact it looks damned similar, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one he made.”

  “If you’re right about the local celebration.”

  “Well, celebration or not, someone is making these things. Now look at that one over there.” He led her over to a bend in the gravel and shell road that wound through the spare trees behind the cabins. “Look at all that decorative filigree. You can’t tell me that’s random chance at work. Besides this one’s a little bigger, and shaped a bit differently.” He bent and placed her hand on the pattern. She jerked back as if shocked.

  “It feels weird,” she said, looking around nervously. “I see a few more over by those trees. I wonder how many of these things there are, anyway.”

  “Just a few, I think. I mean, how many locals can there be? Full-time residents of The Shores? Not more than three dozen, I would think.”

  * * *

  But the number of “eggs” they found around the cabin and especially on their daily walks down the beach doubled, doubled again, and doubled again. Eileen stopped mentioning them, and after awhile even stopped looking at them as far as Scott could tell.

  Scott could look at little else. The round tops of the eggs made a knobbed carpet from the back of the beach up the grassy slope to the rocks beyond, and he could see a scattering wedged precariously on the high cliffs above. Sometimes they had to veer out of the way of some glacier-like encroachment of eggs onto the beach, stepping into the mossy edges of the water more than once. He did so with trepidation; Eileen simply marched on with no change in expression.

  Eileen was changing: her breasts swelling, her belly dropping lower, hips and pelvis spreading. Now and then he could see blotches, broken blood vessels in her face. She looked into the mirror with distaste; often she didn’t look into the mirror at all. She was gorgeous. But if he looked only at her belly: the high, tight roundness of it all, he could think only of the eggs filling the landscape around them, and he had to look away as well.

  Eileen had gone from asking him about his own health, his own pains and sensations, his own feelings from several times a day to once, to every week or two, to not at all. He thought it just as well. There was painful activity going on inside which his pills only vaguely and intermittently assuaged.

  One evening he watched as the dark green tide drifted out of the bay and over the sand, farther than it ever had before, covering the grass and lower rocks, seeping through old abandoned beachfront structures whose torn walls were like shredded wounds, creeping almost all the way up to the access road to their cabin. The next morning he was still there on the deck, watching as the tide rolled out, leaving thousands upon thousands of new eggs behind.

  * * *

  “I can’t leave. The baby will be here any day,” she said. “I have to get ready.”

  “Eileen, look what’s happening here. We have to get out!”

  She held on to each side of her belly, swollen like an overripe fruit, extending her palms as if to shield the baby’s ears from the argument. “I don’t know what’s happening here, Scott, and neither do you. I haven’t known what was happening since you got the cancer. A lot of things are happening that are just completely out of our control, things we don’t seem to be able to do one thing about. But I can control how I carry this baby, and I’m not going to risk leaving now. You don’t what those things out there are, anyway.”

  “They’re eggs, just like you said in the first place. Huge eggs, an enormous multitude of them. They’ll be filling the roads soon, and then there’ll be no way out of here.”

  “All the more reason not to risk the travel. Besides, what makes you think they’ll harm us in any way? They’re eggs, Scott. Just like this baby used to be. And now this big belly of mine is as firm and tight as one of those shells. Maybe you’re feeling you’re not quite ready for this—I can certainly understand that. But this baby is going to happen, Scott.”

  They hashed it over a couple more times before he gave up and left. He didn’t want to upset her by pushing too hard. He was already upset enough for the both of them. His pain had increased over the last several days—there was this enormous pressure, and he’d been able to eat hardly a thing. Eileen’s appetite, of course, had grown prodigious. He didn’t think she’d even noticed when he hadn’t touched his own food.

  He was running into the little village to find the doctor, hoping maybe he could talk some sense into her. She’d always paid attention to doctors—she’d hung on every word his own doctors had said, treating them as if they were priests. He bounded onto the darkened sidewalk, running full speed into a tall figure in a damp raincoat.

  The odour in his face was old and stale. He peered up into the damp face of his landlord, whose nostrils widened at Scott’s proximity. The man’s eyes appeared oddly wide and filmy, and his face had greyed since Scott had seen him last. Flecks of dry skin layered his cheeks. “Eileen,” Scott began anxiously. “My wife, I can’t get her to leave.”

  The man’s voice was blubbery, a frothy translation. “No... one... asked you...”

  “You’re local, that might have some sort of authority with her. You can tell her about the eggs, what they really are.”

  “No... one... asked you... to stay...”

  “But our child...”

  “But... our... chill... dren...” His landlord pushed away.

  The doctor’s office was locked, though through the glass door Scott saw a bare bulb glowing yellow in the waiting room ceiling. Shadows slithered across the back wall that led to the examining rooms. He began to shout, then beat on the pane until it splintered. No response, and the shadows continued their distant dance. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around the room. One had spilled, the cascade of papers left to drift across the centre rug. Ultrasounds. Curved shapes, vague, radiating lines. Faces and almost faces in the thousands.

  Scott turned away from the doctor’s door and began beating on the door of the next shop in the row. After almost an hour Scott had been unable to rouse anyone out of any of the dark little shops. If anyone had heard him, they obviously didn’t care to help. As he headed back toward the cabin he had to side-step a number of eggs which had not been in his path before. He kicked one out of the way, just for the hell of it. Heavy as stone. He yelped and stumbled, watching the egg rock back and forth before settling itself onto its broad side. Cloud cover had filled in every gap of sky since his departure. Distant lightning illuminated edges of thunderhead. As far as he could see before him a tide of eggs rose and fell over the hills and pastures, gathering beneath and climbing to the lower boughs of trees. Growing, developing, dividing and complicating in ways unimaginable, a chaos of life uncaring, far beyond anything he might possibly comprehend. Infiltrating carcinoma, diffusely spreading metastases... Sometimes knowing the truth was not better. Sometimes the truth made an irrelevance of our lives.

  When it began raining he tried to walk a little faster, but a road to walk on became increasingly rare. Egg pushed against egg until all repositioned and spread from horizon to horizon until half the visible world had been filled in. Lightning flashes showed off the innate lustre of the shells, as increasing downpour made the curves change, lengthen and soften. He stepped up on their backs gingerly at first, going from egg to egg as if crossing a stream on oily round stones.

  Then he heard Eileen’s voice calling through the slam of rain and he stepped hard and smashed and pushed forward with shoe
s caught in the breaking shells. He fell again and again with hands in goo and fierce activity snapping at his fingers but no matter because Eileen was screaming now against the crash of the shores and sky.

  Pain ripped through his belly so completely infiltrated now he could not distinguish between stomach and pain, pain and colon and oesophagus in a confusion of cells. Around him seethed an ocean of the newborn, sliding easily through shell wall, eye and claw-foot and tentacle, and all of them different, all of them distinguishable, a thousand faces of the thousand forms.

  “Scott!” She screamed and he saw her rise up in tatters, their child but one more child who would never know or understand or care who its parents had been.

  But still he ran and smashed and bled to hold these tatters of her in awe. He closed his eyes in a last pathetic attempt to shut out the truth as around him the chaos that was the true face of the world turned and ate of itself again and again, the new bearing but brief witness to the old as their flesh grows thin, thinner still, and dissolves.

  FROM CABINET 34, DRAWER 6

  by CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  5:46 P.M.

  THE OLD THEATRE on Asylum Street smells like stale popcorn and the spilled soft drinks that have soured on the sticky floors, and the woman sitting in the very back row, the woman with the cardboard box open in her lap, shuts her eyes. A precious few seconds free of the ridiculous things on the screen, just the theatre stink and the movie sounds—a scream and a splash, a gunshot—and then the man coughs again. Thin man in his navy-blue fedora and his threadbare gabardine jacket, the man with the name that sounds like an ice-cream flavour, and when she opens her eyes he’s still sitting there in the row in front of her, looking at her expectantly over the back of his seat. The screen becomes a vast rectangular halo about his head, a hundred thousand shades of grey, and “Well,” he says, “there you have it.”

  “I don’t know what I’m seeing any more,” she says and he nods his head very slowly, up and down, up and down, like a small, pale thing on the sea, and she looks up at the screen again.

  The man in the rubber monster suit, the flicker, the soft, insectile flutter from the projector in the booth above her head.

  “Just an old movie,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says knowingly, not bothering to whisper because there’s no one else is in the theatre but the two of them, him and her, the skinny, antique man and the bookish woman with her cardboard box. “A silly old movie to scare children at Saturday afternoon matinees, to scare teenage girls—”

  “Is that what it is? Is that the truth?”

  “The truth,” he says, smiles a tired sort of a smile and coughs again. A handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his thin lips clean, and then the man with the ice-cream name stares for a moment into his own spit and phlegm caught in folds of linen as though they were tea leaves and he could read the future there.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s what you would call it,” he tells her, stuffing the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “You would call it that until something better comes along.”

  On screen, a cavern beneath the black Amazonian lake, glycerine mist and rifle smoke, and the creature’s gills rise and fall, struggling for breath; its bulging eyes are as blank and empty as the glass eyes of a taxidermied fish.

  “It’s almost over,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “Are you staying for the end?”

  “I might talk,” the woman whispers, even though they are alone, and the creature roars, its plated, scaly flesh torn by bullets, by knives and spears; rivulets of dark blood leak from its latex hide, and the old man nods his head again.

  “You might. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Would someone try to stop me?”

  “Someone already has, Miss Morrow.”

  And now it’s her turn to nod, and she looks away from the movie screen, the man in the latex suit’s big death scene up there, the creature drifting limp and lifeless to the bottom of its lonely, weedy lagoon. Lacey Morrow looks down at the box in her lap, and If I’d never found the goddamned thing, she thinks, if someone else had found it instead of me. All the things she would give away for that to be true, years or memories, her life if she could die without knowing the things she knows now.

  “Well, there it is,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says again and the last frames flicker past before the screen goes white and the red velvet curtain comes down and the house lights come up. “Not quite as silly as I remember. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon.”

  “Will they mind if I sit here a little longer?” she asks and he shrugs his thin shoulders, stands and straightens the lapels of his jacket, fusses with the collar of his shirt.

  “No,” he says. “I shouldn’t think they’d mind at all.”

  She doesn’t watch him leave, keeps her eyes fixed on the box, and his shoes make small, uneven sounds against the sticky floor.

  1:30 P.M.

  Waking from an uneasy dream of childhood, a seashore and her sisters and something hanging in the sky, something terrible that she wouldn’t look at no matter what they promised her. Lacey blinks and squints through the streaky train window at the Connecticut countryside rushing by, surely Connecticut by now, probably somewhere well past Springfield and headed for Hartford. Crazy quilt of fields and pasture land stitched together with October leaves, the fiery boughs of birch and beech and hickory to clothe red Jurassic sandstone, and then she catches sight of the winding, silver-grey ribbon of the river to the west, flashing bright beneath the morning sun. She rubs her eyes, blinks at all that sunlight and wishes that she hadn’t dozed off. But trains almost always lull her to sleep, sooner or later, the steady, heartbeat rhythm of the wheels against the rails, steel-on-steel lullaby, and the more random rattle and clatter of the couplings for punctuation.

  She checks to see that the cardboard box is still there on the empty aisle seat beside her, that her satchel is still stowed safely at her feet, and, reassured, Lacey glances quickly about the car, slightly embarrassed at having fallen asleep. That strangers have been watching her sleep and she might have snored or drooled or mumbled foolish things in her dreams, but the car is mostly empty, anyway—a teenage girl reading a paperback, a priest reading a newspaper—and she looks back to the window, her nightmare already fading in the warmth of the day. They’re closer to the river now, and she can see a small boat—a fishing boat, perhaps—cutting a V-shaped wake on the water.

  “Have yourself a nice little nap, then?” and Lacey turns, startled, clipping the corner of the box with her elbow and it almost tumbles to the floor before she can catch it. There’s a woman in the seat directly behind her, someone she hadn’t noticed only a moment before, painfully thin woman with tangled, oyster-white hair, neither very old nor very young, and she’s staring at Lacey with watery blue eyes that seem to bulge slightly, intently, from their sockets. Her skin is dry and sallow, and there’s a sickly, jaundiced tint to her cheeks. She’s wearing a dingy black raincoat and a heavy sweater underneath, wool the colour of instant oatmeal, and her nubby fingernails are painted an incongruous flamingo pink.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the woman says in her deliberate, gravel-voice, and Lacey shakes her head no, “No, it’s okay. I guess I’m not quite awake, that’s all.”

  “I was starting to think I’d have to wake you up myself,” the woman says impatiently, still staring. “I’m only going as far as Hartford. I don’t have the time to go any farther than that.” As she talks, Lacey has begun to notice a very faint, fishy smell, fish or low-tide mud flats, brine and silt and stranded, suffocating sea creatures. The odour seems to be coming from the white-haired woman, her breath or her clothes, and Lacey pretends not to notice.

  “You’re sitting there thinking, ‘Who’s this lunatic?’ ain’t you? ‘Who’s this deranged woman and how can I get her to shut the hell up and leave me alone?’”

  “No, I just don’t—”

  “Oh, yes you are,” the woman says and she jabs an index finger at Lacey, candy-pi
nk polish and her knuckles like dirty, old tree roots. “But that’s okay. You don’t know me from Adam. You aren’t supposed to know me, Miss Morrow.”

  Lacey glances at the other passengers, the girl and the priest. Neither of them are looking her way, still busy with their reading, and if they’ve even noticed the white-haired woman they’re pretending that they haven’t. Not like she’s their problem, and Lacey says a silent, agnostic’s prayer that it isn’t much farther to the Hartford station; she smiles and the woman makes a face like she’s been insulted.

  “It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight. I’m sticking my neck out, just talking to you.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Lacey says, trying hard to sound sorry instead of nervous, instead of annoyed. “But I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Me, I’m nothing but a messenger. A courier,” the woman replies, lowering her voice almost to a whisper and glaring suspiciously towards the other two passengers. “Of course, that wouldn’t make much difference, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

  “Well, you got the box right there,” the woman says and now she’s pointing over the back of Lacey’s seat at the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil packed inside. “That makes you a courier, too. Hell, that almost makes you a goddamn holy prophet on Judgement Day. But you probably haven’t thought of it that way, have you?”

  “Maybe it would be better if we talked later,” Lacey whispers, playing along, and the woman’s probably perfectly harmless, but she puts one hand protectively on the box, anyway. “They might be listening,” she says and nods her head towards the teenager and the priest. “They might hear something we don’t want them to hear.”