Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Are you all right?” I called. I was dressed in thick layers but I could still feel the chill in the air. This man must have been swimming in temperatures close to freezing. He didn’t say anything and I thought, My God, he’s in shock. He’s been washed ashore from a ship run aground on the rocks. But then he seemed to find his voice and I realised his hesitation was down to a lack in his English—he was obviously from distant shores. Perhaps Scandinavian. Perhaps Slav.

“I apologise,” he said, “if I startle you.”

“It’s not a problem,” I assured him. “You just don’t expect to see people swimming at this time of night, at this time of the year.”

“I am swimming every day,” he said. “All year round.”

“Do you live on the island?”

“This area has been in my family’s blood for centuries.”

“My name’s Adrian,” I said, and extended my hand. He seemed nonplussed, as if he had never been taught the rituals of introduction.

“Gluckmann,” he said, finally, but he left my hand dangling.

I nodded, withdrew my arm, suddenly struck by the farcical situation I was in: chatting at midnight with a naked man of my own age—if not older—in the freezing cold.

“Well,” I said. “It was nice to meet you.”

I left him on the shore and picked my way back up to the causeway, pausing at the top to look back. He was still standing there, staring after me. There was no evidence of any clothes, or even a towel, nearby. I felt giddy. I felt as though I wanted to run away, as fast as I could.

We had not shaken hands, yet I felt as though my skin was greasy from his touch. And there was a smell in my clothes, though it hadn’t been there before I met him—a fishy smell, but not the clean, marine piquancy one knows from clean seawater; this was the days-old odour of tainted things, of rotting prawns and mussels gone bad. And hadn’t his skin been a little strange? Was it just that he was old that it seemed spongy and loose, with the texture of raw tripe? Was it merely the slackening of tissue from the piling on of years that gave his fingers a webbed appearance?

Nonsense, I told myself, over and over, as I fumbled to get the key in the lock with fingers that felt thick and unresponsive with fear. I was close to crying out, but I must not. If I disturbed the Cotterhams from their slumber I’d have some explaining to do, and I had nothing to offer beyond the unhinging of my own sanity.

Once I had the door closed on the world, I leaned my head against the wood and tried to calm my laboured heart. I felt his scrutiny through the stone ramparts. Was that who I’d seen earlier? Both from the window of the plane, and while taking in the view from the Soldier’s Quarters? Nonsense, nonsense. But the conviction would not be dissolved, no matter how much I tried to reason with myself.

You would die if you spent too much time in that water. Exposure, hypothermia… yet he had looked as unbothered by the perilous temperatures as an elephant seal, his flesh retaining a healthy pinkness despite its saggy constitution.

I stumbled towards bed, making sure I locked the door of the Soldier’s Quarters. The cold had not been vanquished by that old radiator. Fully clothed, I slid between the sheets of my bed and fell into a tortuous sleep populated by an impossible creature, born from the silly discomfort that Gluckmann had instilled in me, yet blown up into a thing of terror so alarming I could barely credit how my mind had come to fashion it.

My imagination was that of a normal human being, a dull old man if I was being honest. I had never been a fan of the kind of films that were popular among the young: films about death and blood, full of monsters that hunted for human meat. Not my cup of tea. And yet here was a beast that would not look out of place in such a feature.

I dreamed of the old man standing at the sea’s edge, and changing… His horribly soft skin hung in swags around him like discarded clothes. Beneath this thin film that kept his shape vaguely human thrashed an oily roil of cartilaginous limbs, a knot of furious movement like that of an overdue infant impatient to be born. I saw the shudder of his head as his jaws reared back, carrying such a great cargo of teeth that they ought not be able to fit in a human mouth. He was making awful gluk-gluk noises in his throat, which was blocked, crammed with food he had not chewed properly.

His eyes bulged as he worked this mass, but even as he struggled to swallow whatever it was, he was raising more fistfuls of dinner to mash between his fangs—what looked like filthy carrot tops, but which resolved themselves into the hair of dismembered men, women and children, burst and broken between his fingers. He was gigantic, then, though my dream up until that point had not given me a frame of reference against which he could be measured.