Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

As I did so, I nervously eyed the surf, searching for a glimpse of Mr. Gluckmann. But surely he would be at work today? I tried to imagine what sort of job he did, but could not shake the unpleasant images of him picking his teeth with the splintered bones of something he’d just consumed. He looked like the type of person who entertained vast appetites. When he wasn’t swimming, I imagined him eating—his wide, fleshy mouth enveloping tidbits like some ravenous sucking loach at the bottom of a fish tank.

I set myself against the wind once more and wobbled upright, but then my eye was distracted by something on the causeway, blocking my route, and I almost fell from the saddle. Covering my mouth with my hand, I pushed the bicycle to the edge of an apron of blood. It was dried into the causeway rock, but it possessed a lighter shade, suggesting it had not been long since it had been spilled.

At the centre of this was a hare, or the remains of a hare—all I could discern amid the twisted, denuded limbs, was a pair of matted ears and a few dried, salt-encrusted organs that were either inedible or a mouthful too far for whatever had destroyed the poor thing. The chewed, grey foreleg bones poked from the shredded sleeves of its fur like knitting needles freighted with an aborted garment. I guessed it must have been picked clean by seagulls, but what had done for it in the first place, and why had it been left here, like some warning?

I shuddered to imagine Penny or Ralph seeing this (I was in no doubt that they would consider me a dreadful person for leaving it in full view of them, or anybody else who should come this way), so I toed it off the causeway, into a rock pool where the crabs could undress it further at their leisure.

I went on my way, struggling up the hill, negotiating potholes and puddles, cursing the painful, self-inflicted wounds in my palms, until I reached a level surface where I could get a little speed up. It was hard work. The blanketing of many years played its part, but I had to accept that I was not the fit man of even ten years previously.

Eventually I hit a downward slope and freewheeled for the best part of a mile, pretty much all the way to the harbour. I slowly levered myself off the bicycle and locked it against the drainpipe of the harbour inn. My shirt was glued to my back, and I was having trouble calming my breath down. I felt a little panicky for a moment, wondering if I really ought to have been doing this at all, considering my reasons for being here in the first place, but gradually the dials all started to swing back to normal.

There were no suitable hiding places to get away from the wind that hadn’t already been snaffled by families and lovers, so I decided I had deserved a drink and settled myself in a corner of the inn’s beach-view patio.

I had an interminable wait until some young thing with more tattoos than wit came to take my order. I asked for a pint of bitter and a newspaper, and she trotted off, leaving me to wonder if she’d poured herself into those skin-tight satin trousers.

An hour passed pleasantly enough. Putting some distance between me and the fort (and, by extension, the hare and Mr. Gluckmann) had done wonders for my mood. The beer had something to do with it too, I’m sure, but for the first time I felt as though I was relaxing, that I didn’t feel the need to be anywhere or to be doing something. Time was redundant (other than helping me to decide when I should order my lunch) and there were no appointments to fret about. I wrote a couple of postcards to my sons, then leaned back to try to allow as much vitamin D as possible into my skin, and opened the newspaper.

People began to drift into the patio and the tables filled up around me. I asked the waitress for fish and chips and took a break from the cryptic crossword to watch the activity on the beach.

The breakwater was host to a bunch of teenagers in swimming costumes performing bombs and swan dives off the edge. Older people wrapped up against the chill stood along the railing, watching, shaking their heads. It was busy, despite the cold—fun-seekers desperate to eke out one last day of larks on the beach, no matter how distant and weak the sun was becoming.

The waves creamed against the bank of dark, damp sand, pushing before it a line of debris—driftwood, seaweed—that failed to settle. It was turning out to be a lovely day, but my eye was drawn to a haze of dark cloud far away to the east. There was rain in that—you could tell by the faintest teased-away columns within it, darker, grainier, like pleats of shadow in a lace wedding dress.

Ah, Clarissa, you would have loved it here.