Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Then came the night she caught him during his admiration, heard him call the boggy green expanse beautiful. “That’s crazy, Scott. Look at it—it’s like floating rot. You can’t swim in it—you can’t even walk through it.”

He turned to her with a small smile, the largest he could muster in these times. “Then maybe you can walk on it,” he said, hoping to make her even angrier. “I see you’ve decided not to enjoy our little vacation after all.”

She ran back into the room, crying. He still smiled—he couldn’t get the smile off his face. But he felt terrible. He was a jerk, she should leave him. Why wasn’t she leaving him?

He turned back to the great, dark, crumbling shore, the slow-moving tide a deep greenish-brown even in moonlight. Fertile, abundant with life, eating itself and eating itself until one day there would be no more. He wondered when Nature had stopped having rules.

The next morning he found the body of a large dog washed up on the shore, a sizeable piece chewed out of its side. Another morning it was a syringe placed upright in the sand like a crucifix. Still another day something long and serpentine had wriggled its way up and down the beach, leaving patterns like words, a drawn-out nyarlathhhh... followed by extended obliterations. He didn’t show Eileen any of this. She stayed locked in their bedroom, crying. She loved him, and he no longer deserved her. He was worried about how he might treat her in the future—there seemed to be no rules for behaviour any more.

Finally one morning she came out for breakfast, her eyes red but dry. She brought along the morning newspaper, again The Shores. “It says here that the towns along this section of coast have had an unusually high birth rate over the past five years. Nobody can explain it.”

He stared at her. The eggs in his mouth tasted funny, but most food did these days. He wasn’t even sure he should be eating eggs. He’d paid little attention to the diet they’d handed him. Eileen would know, but now she was proffering up some sort of conversational gambit. He owed her a reply. “Any details about these births... um...” The egg clung to the inside of his mouth and would not go down. “Anomalies, that sort of thing?”

She seemed to be staring at his mouth. He wondered if she understood his problem with the bit of egg. It felt mobile against his tongue, as if alive. He thought he felt a vestige of pseudopod, tried to wrest the thought from his mind.

“What... what do you mean?” She stammered slightly, but was still in control. Obviously the wrong thing for him to say. But now he was stuck having to explain himself.

“Um... congenital malformations,” said awkwardly about the egg. “Birth...” a hard swallow and it was down. “...defects.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, staring at him. He could feel the cold sweat trickling down his forehead. “There’s nothing about that sort of thing at all.”

“Then...” He took a quick swallow of juice, acid burn all the way down the oesophagus, whatever his stomach had become in flames. God,

he thought, ordinary food is poison to me now. “The babies... they all turned out normal.”

She smiled a little, and now it was he doing the staring. It was the first smile he’d seen on her in days—and it looked good. “Well, as normal as any of us can turn out, I suppose. I mean, the article didn’t mention birth defect incidence, any of that... I, well it’s been making me think—I’ve been thinking—oh, Scott, I’ve just decided you’re right, we should have a child, we should have it now.”

He should have refused, of course. People don’t change their minds about something so important so quickly. But if he’d learned anything in recent months it was that intention mattered little, and desire mattered less. He smiled at her, then looked for something to do. He picked up his fork and played with the remains of the egg but could not bring himself to eat any more. He couldn’t even touch the glass containing the yellow acid. Finally his hand rested on the newspaper she’d left folded on the table. He picked it up. “You’re sure?” he asked, opening it.

“Well, I’m a little scared about it, I admit. I mean, who wouldn’t be? A decision like this.” She twisted her napkin, not quite able to meet his eyes. “But I’m... scared a lot of the time. I guess we both are.” He could tell she was waiting for confirmation from him. He wanted to help her out, but he just couldn’t. “You’ve made me very happy,” he said, and it seemed strangely false, formal. He covered by fussing with the paper. After an indecent pause, he said, “It says here there was another fish kill off Innsmouth.”

He waited for her to say something. He kept his eyes on the paper. Finally, “Innsmouth?”

“You know, a few miles up the shore? We passed it on the way down here. It was the last city before the big billboard.”

“I don’t remember a billboard.”

“Well, I thought I pointed it out. I meant to.”