Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

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.

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