Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

It wouldn’t budge for rust. He dropped the case and clutched two-handed at the obstruction while he hurled every ounce of himself at it. The bar gave a reluctant gritty clank, only to reveal that a presence as strong as Jessop was on the far side of the door. It was the wind, which slackened enough to let him and the door stagger forward. He blocked the door with one foot as he snatched up the briefcase. Outside was a narrow unlit alley between the backs of houses. Noise and something more palpable floundered at him—the wind, bearing a tangle of voices and music. At the end of the alley, less than twenty feet away, three men were waiting for him.

Wiry Paul was foremost, flanked by Joe and Tom. He’d pulled his bobble hat down to his eyebrows and was flexing his arms like thick stalks in a tide. “You aren’t leaving now we’ve given you a name,” he said.

A flare of rage that was mostly panic made Jessop shout “My name’s Paul.”

“Fight you for it,” the other man offered, prancing forward.

“I’m not playing any more games with anyone.”

“Then we aren’t either. You won.”

“Won the moment you stepped through the door,” Tom seemed to think Jessop wanted to hear.

Jessop remembered the notice about a competition. It was immediately clear to him that however much he protested, he was about to receive his prize. “You were the quiz,” Paul told him as Joe and Tom took an identical swaying pace forward.

Jessop swung around and bolted for the main road. The dark on which the houses turned their backs felt close to solid with the gale and the sounds entangled in it. The uproar was coming from the houses, from televisions and music systems turned up loud. It made him feel outcast, but surely it had to mean there would be help within earshot if he needed to appeal for it. He struggled against the relentless gale towards the distant gap that appeared to mock his efforts by tossing back and forth. He glanced over his shoulder to see Paul and his cronies strolling after him. A car sped past the gap ahead as if to tempt him forward while he strove not to be blown into an alley to his right. Or should he try that route even if it took him farther from the main road? The thought of being lost as well as pursued had carried him beyond the junction when Betty and Mary blocked his view of the road.

They were still wearing dresses that flapped in the wind, but they were more than broad enough to leave him no escape. The gale lifted Mary’s tresses and sent them scuttling crabwise at Jessop. “Some of us try to be more like her,” Mary growled with a defensiveness close to violence. “Try to find out what’ll make her happier.”

“Lots have tried,” Betty said in much the same tone. “We’re just the first that’s had her sort on board.”

“Shouldn’t be surprised if her sisters want to see the world now too.”

“She doesn’t just take,” Betty said more defensively still. “She provides.”

Jessop had been backing away throughout this, both from their words and from comprehending them, but he couldn’t leave behind the stale upsurge of his dinner. When he reached the junction again he didn’t resist the gale. It sent him sidling at a run into the dark until he managed to turn. The houses that walled him in were derelict and boarded up, yet the noise on both sides of him seemed unabated, presumably because the inhabitants of the nearest occupied buildings had turned the volume higher. Why was the passage darkening? He didn’t miss the strip of moonlit cloud until he realised it was no longer overhead. At that moment his footsteps took on a note more metallic than echoes between bricks could account for, but his ears had fastened on another sound—a song.

It was high and sweet and not at all human. It seemed capable of doing away with his thoughts, even with his fleeting notion that it could contain all music. Nothing seemed important except following it to its source—certainly not the way the floor tilted abruptly beneath him, throwing him against one wall. Before long he had to leave his briefcase in order to support himself against the metal walls of the corridor. He heard the clientele of the Seafarer tramp after him, and looked back to see the derelict houses rock away beyond Mary and Betty. All this struck him as less than insignificant, except for the chugging of engines that made him anxious to be wherever it wouldn’t interfere with the song. Someone opened a hatch for him and showed him how to grasp the uprights of the ladder that led down into the unlit dripping hold. “That’s what sailors hear,” said another of the crew as Jessop’s foot groped downwards, and Jessop wondered if that referred to the vast wallowing beneath him as well as the song. For an instant too brief for the notion to stay in his mind he thought he might already have glimpsed the nature of the songstress. You’d sing like that if you looked like that, came a last thought. It seemed entirely random to him, and he forgot it as the ancient song drew him into the enormous cradle of darkness.