Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  “It’s in your cities people go off and leave each other,” muttered Tom.

  “No, I mean you aren’t the only ones in your village. I got the idea from your friend Mr Beach you were.”

  Tom looked ready to deny any friendship, but it seemed he was preparing to demand “Calling him a liar, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t say a liar, just mistaken,” Grant said, nodding at the wall the cottage shared with its neighbour. His hosts merely eyed him as though they couldn’t hear the renewed sounds beyond the wall, a floundering and shuffling that brought to mind someone old or otherwise incapacitated. “Rats?” he was compelled to assume.

  “We’ve seen a few of those in our time,” said Tom, continuing to regard him.

  If that was meant for wit, Grant found it offered no more than the least of the children he’d had to teach. Some acoustic effect made the rat sound much larger as it scuffed along the far side of the wall before receding into the other cottage. Rather than risk stirring it or his hosts up further, Grant concentrated on downing enough of his meal to allow him to push away his plate and mime fullness. He was certainly full of a taste not altogether reminiscent of fish; he felt as though he was trying to swim through it, or it through him. When he drank a glass of the pitcher of water that had been the solitary accompaniment to the meal, he thought the taste was in there too.

  Fiona cleared the plates into the sink, and that was the end of dinner. “Shall I help?” Grant had been brought up to offer.

  “That’s her work.”

  Since Fiona smiled indulgently at that, Grant didn’t feel entitled to disagree. “I’d better go and phone, then.”

  He imagined he saw a pale shape lurch away from the window into the unspecific dimness—it must have been Fiona’s reflection as she turned to blink at him. “He said you had.”

  “I ought to let my friends know I won’t be seeing them tonight.”

  “They’ll know when you don’t, won’t they? We don’t want the waves carrying you off” Wiping her hands on a cloth that might have been part of someone’s discarded garment, she pulled out a drawer beside the sink. “Stay in and we’ll play a few games.”

  While the battered cardboard box she opened on the table was labelled LUDO, that wasn’t quite what it contained. Rattling about on top of the familiar board inside the box were several fragments of a substance Grant told himself wasn’t bone. “We make our own amusement round here,” Fiona said. “We use whatever’s sent us.”

  “He’s not your lad.”

  “He could be.”

  The scrape of Grant’s chair on the stone floor went some way towards expressing his discomfort. “I’ll phone now,” he said.

  “Not driving, are you?” Tom enquired.

  “Not at all.” Grant couldn’t be bothered resenting whatever the question implied. “I’m going to enjoy the walk.”

  “He’ll be back soon for you to play with,” Tom told his wife.

  She turned to gaze out at the dark while Tom’s stare weighed on their visitor, who stood up. “I won’t need a key, will I?”

  “We’ll be waiting for you,” Fiona mumbled.

  Grant sensed tension as oppressive as a storm, and didn’t thank the bare floorboards for amplifying his retreat along the hall. He seized the clammy latch and hauled the front door open. The night was almost stagnant. Subdued waves smoothed themselves out on the black water beyond the sea wall, inside which the bay chattered silently with whiteness beneath the incomplete mask of a moon a few days short of full. An odour he no longer thought it adequate to call fishy lingered in the humid air or inside him as he hurried towards the phone box.

  The heat left over from the day more than kept pace with him. The infrequent jab of chill wind simply encouraged the smell. He wondered if an allergy to whatever he’d eaten was beginning to make itself felt in a recurrent sensation, expanding through him from his stomach, that his flesh was turning to rubber. The cottages had grown intensely present as chunks of moon fallen to earth, and seemed less deserted than he’d taken them to be: the moonlight showed that patches of some of the windows had been rubbed or breathed or even licked imperfectly clear. Once he thought faces rose like flotsam to watch him from the depths of three successive cottages, unless the same face was following him from house to ruined house. When he failed to restrain himself from looking, of course there was only moonlit dimness, and no dead cat in the general store. He did his best to scoff at himself as he reached the phone box.

  Inside, the smell was lying in wait for him. He held the door open with his foot, though that admitted not only the infrequent wind but also more of the light that made his hand appear as pale as the receiver in it was black. His clumsy swollen fingers found the number in his pocket and held the scrap of paper against the inside of a frame that had once contained a mirror above the phone. Having managed to dial, he returned the paper to its niche against his unreasonably flabby thigh and clutched the receiver to his face with both hands. The fourth twosome of rings was parted by a clatter that let sounds of revelry at him, and belatedly a voice. “Who’s this?”

  For longer than a breath Grant felt as if he was being forced to stand up in class for a question he couldn’t answer, and had to turn it back on the questioner. “It’s Ian, isn’t it?”

  “Bill,” Ian said, and shouted it to their friends. “Where have you got to?” he eventually thought to ask.

  “I’ve broken down on the coast. I’m getting the car fixed tomorrow.”

  “When are we seeing you?”

  “I told you, tomorrow,” Grant said, though the notion felt remote in more ways than he could name.

  “Have a drink for us, then, and we will for you. Won’t we, you crew?”

  The enthusiasm this aroused fell short of Grant, not least because he’d been reminded of the water accompanying dinner, a memory that revived the taste of the meal. “Don’t get too pissed to drive tomorrow,” Ian advised and made way for a chorus of drunken encouragement followed by the hungry buzz of the receiver.

  Grant planted the receiver on its hook and shoved himself out of the box. Even if Baiting had boasted a pub, he would have made straight for his room; just now, supine was the only position that appealed to him. As the phone box shut with a muted thud that emphasised the desertion of the seafront, he set out along the top of the submerged wall.

  It was broad enough for him to feel safe even if he wobbled— luckily for his career, however distant that seemed, teachers didn’t have to be able to swim. He wouldn’t have minded being able to progress at more than a shuffle towards the landmark of his car blackened by the moonlight, but the unsynchronised restlessness flanking him made him feel less than stable, as if he was advancing through some unfamiliar medium. The luminous reflection of the arc of cottages hung beneath them, a lower jaw whose unrest suggested it was eager to become a knowing grin. The shape of the bay must be causing ripples to resemble large slow bubbles above the huddle of round whitish shapes along the middle of the sea wall. He still couldn’t make them out, nor how many images of the moon were tracking him on or just beneath the surface of the inlet. The closer he came to the halfway mark, the larger the bubbles appeared to grow. He was within a few yards of them, and feeling mesmerised by his own pace and by the whispers of the sea, when he heard a protracted stealthy wallowing behind him. He turned to find he had company on the far end of the wall.

  It must be a swimmer, he told himself. Its glistening suggested it was wearing a wet suit rendered pallid by the moon; surely it couldn’t be naked. Was the crouched figure making a joke of his progress? As it began to drag its feet, which struck him as unnecessarily large, along the wall, it looked no more at home on the path than he felt. Its head was bent low, and yet he had the disconcerting impression that it was presenting its face to him. It had shuffled several paces before he was able to grasp that he would rather outdistance it than see it in greater detail. He swung around and faltered just one step in the direction of his car. Whi
le his attention had been snared, another figure as squat and pale and dripping had set out for him from the opposite end of the wall.

  He was paralysed by the spectacle of the pair converging effortfully but inexorably on him, the faces on their lowered heads indisputably towards him, until a movement let him peer in desperation at the farthest cottage. The front door had opened, and over the car roof he saw Tom. “Can you come and help me?” Grant shouted, stumbling towards him along the wall.

  The cottages flattened and shrank his voice and sent him Tom’s across the bay. “No need for that.”

  “There is,” Grant pleaded. “That’s in my way.”

  “Rude bugger.”

  Grant had to struggle to understand this meant him. It added itself to the sight of the advancing figure pallid as the underside of a dead fish. The closer it shuffled, the less it appeared to have for a face. “What are they?” he cried.

  “They’re all the moon brings us these days,” Tom said, audibly holding Grant or people like him responsible, and stepped out of the cottage. He was naked, like the figures on the wall. The revelation arrested Grant while Tom plodded to the car. Indeed, he watched Tom unlock it and climb in before this sent him forward. “Stop that,” he yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my car.”

  The Cavalier was no more likely to start first time for a naked driver than it ever did for him, he promised himself. Then it spluttered out a mass of fumes and performed a screeching U-turn. “Come back,” Grant screamed. “You can’t do that. You’re polluting your environment.”

  No doubt his protests went unheard over the roaring of the engine. The sound took its time over dwindling once the coastline hid the car. The squat whitish shapes had halted once Grant had begun shouting. He strode at the figure crouched between him and the cottage and, since it didn’t retreat, with as little effect at the other. He was repeating the manoeuvre, feeling like a puppet of his mounting panic, when that was aggravated by a burst of mirth. Fiona had appeared in the cottage doorway and was laughing at him. “Just jump in,” she called across the water.

  He didn’t care how childish his answer sounded if she was capable of saving him. “I can’t swim.”

  “What, a big strong lad like you?” Her heartiness increased as she declared “You can now. You can float, at any rate. Give it a try. We’ll have to feed you up.”

  Beyond the spur of the coastline the sound of the car rose to a harsh note that was terminated by a massive splash. “That’s the end of that,” Fiona called. “You can be one of my big babies instead.”

  Grant’s mind was refusing to encompass the implications of this when Tom came weltering like a half-submerged lump of the moon around the bay. Grant dashed along the sea wall, away from Fiona and Tom. He was almost at the middle section when he saw far too much in the water: not just the way that section could be opened as a gate, but the pallid roundish upturned faces that were clustered alongside. They must be holding their breath to have grown clear at last, their small flat unblinking eyes and, beneath the noseless nostrils, perfectly round mouths gaping in hunger that looked like surprise. As he wavered, terrified to pass above them, he had a final insight that he could have passed on to a classroom of pupils: the creatures must be waiting to open the gate and let in the tide and any fish it carried. “Don’t mind them,” Fiona shouted. “They don’t mind we eat their dead. They even bring them now.”

  An upsurge of the fishy taste worse than nausea made Grant stagger along the wall. The waiting shape crouched forward, displaying the round-mouthed emotionless face altogether too high on its plump skull. Hands as whitish and as fat jerked up from the bay, snatching at Grant’s feet. “That’s the way, show him he’s one of us,” Fiona urged, casting off her clothes as she hurried to the water’s edge.

  She must have been encouraging Grant’s tormentors to introduce him to the water. In a moment fingers caught his ankles and overbalanced him. His frantic instinctive response was to hurl himself away from them, into the open sea. Drowning seemed the most attractive prospect left to him.

  The taste expanded through him, ousting the chill of the water with a sensation he was afraid to name. When he realised it was the experience of floating, he let out a howl that merely cleared his mouth of water. Too many pallid shapes for him to count were heaving themselves over the wall to surround him. He flailed his limbs and then tried holding them still, desperate to find a way of making himself sink. There was none. “Don’t worry,” Fiona shouted as she sloshed across the bay towards him, “you’ll soon get used to our new member of the family,” and, in what felt like the last of his sanity, Grant wondered if she was addressing his captors or Tom.

  FAIR EXCHANGE

  by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  WE WERE IN some bloke’s house the other night, nicking his stuff, and Bazza calls me over. We’ve been there twenty minutes already and if it was anyone else I’d tell them to shut up and get on with it, but Baz and I’ve been thieving together for years and I know he’s not going to be wasting my time. So I put the telly by the back door with the rest of the gear (nice little telly, last-minute find up in the smaller bedroom) and head back to the front room. I been in there already, of course. First place you look. DVD player, CDs, stereo if it’s any good, which isn’t often. You’d be amazed how many people have crap stereos. Especially birds—still got some shit plastic midi-system their dad bought them down the High Street in 1987. (Still got LPs, too, half of them. No fucking use to me, are they? I’m not having it away with an armful of things that weigh a ton and aren’t as good as CDs: where’s the fucking point in that?)

  I make my way to Baz’s shadow against the curtains, and I see he’s going through the drawers in the bureau. Sound tactic if you’ve got a minute. People always seem to think you won’t look in a drawer— Doh!—and so in go the cheque books, cash, personal organiser, old mobile phone. Spare set of keys, if you’re lucky: which case you bide your time, hope they won’t remember the keys were in there, then come back and make it a double feature when the insurance has put back everything you took. They’ve made it easy for you, haven’t they. Pillocks. Anyway, I come up next to Baz, and he presents the drawers. They’re empty. Completely and utterly devoid of stuff. No curry menus, no bent-up party photos, no balls of string or rubber bands, no knackered batteries for the telly remote. No dust, even. It’s like someone opened the two drawers and sucked everything out with a Hoover.

  “Baz, there’s nothing there.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  It’s not that exciting, don’t see Jerry Bruckheimer making a film of it or nothing, but it’s odd. I’ll grant him that. It’s not like the rest of the house is spick and span. There’s stuff spilling out of cupboards, kitchen cabinets, old books sitting in piles on the floor. The carpet on the landing upstairs looks like something got spilt there and never cleared up, and the whole place is dusty and smells of mildew or something. And yet these two drawers, perfect for storing stuff— could even have been designed for the purpose, ha ha ha—are completely empty. Why? You’ll never know. It’s just some private thing. That’s one of the weird bits about burglary. It’s intimate. It’s like being able to see what colour pants everyone is wearing. Actually you could do that too, if you wanted, but that’s not what I meant. Not my cup of tea. Not professional, either.

  “There was nothing in there at all?”

  “Just this,” Baz says, and holds something up so I can see it. “It was right at the back.”

  I took it from him. It’s small, about the size and shape of the end of your thumb. Smooth, cold to the touch. “What is it?”

  “Dunno,” he shrugs. “Marble?”

  “Fucking shit marble, Baz. It’s not even fucking round.”

  Baz shrugs again and I say “Weird” and then it’s time to go. You don’t want to be hanging around any longer than necessary. Don’t want to be in a burning hurry, either—that’s when you can get careless or make too much noise or fo
rget to look both ways as you slip out—but once you’ve found what you came for, you might as well be somewhere else.

  So we go via the kitchen, grab the bin bag full of gear and slip out the back way. Stand outside the door a second, make sure no one’s passing by, then walk out onto the street, calm as you like. Van’s just around the corner. We stroll along the pavement, chatting normally, looking like we live in one of the other houses and walk this way every night. Get in the van—big white fucker, naturally, virtually invisible in London—and off we go.

  It’s fucking magic, that moment.

  The one where you turn the van into the next street and suddenly you’re just part of the evening traffic, and you know it’s done and you’re away and bar a fuck-up with the distribution of the goods it’s like it never happened. I always light a fag right then, crack open the window, smell the London air coming in the van. Warm, cold, it’s London. Best air in the world.

  * * *

  Weird thing, though. Even though it’s not that big a deal, the business with the drawers was still niggling me a few hours later. You do see the odd thing or two in my business—stuff that don’t quite make sense. Couple of months ago we’re doing over a big old house, over Tufnell Park way, and either side of the mantelpiece there’s a painting. Two little paintings, obviously done by the same bloke. Signed the same, for a start. Now, there’s huge photos all over the mantelpiece, including some wedding ones, and it don’t take a genius to work out that these two paintings are of the owners: one of the bloke, and the other of his missus. What’s that about? For a start, you’ve already got all the photos. And why get two paintings, one of each of you? If you’re going to get a painting done, surely you have the two of you together, looking all lovey-dovey and like you’ll never, ever get divorced and stand screaming at each other in some brief’s office arguing about bits of furniture you only bought in the first place because they was there and you had the cash burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe that’s it—you have the paintings done separate so you can split them when you break up. But if you’re already thinking about that, then... Whatever. People are just weird. Baz wanted to draw moustaches on the paintings, but I wouldn’t let him. They can’t have been cheap. So we just did one on the wife.