Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I ordered another drink; my meal came. It was good and fresh, if a little on the large side for a person whose appetites had shrunk somewhat in the preceding decade. But as I got to the end of what I presumed was a fillet of battered cod, my teeth crunched into something that was certainly no shell of deep fried flour and egg. Its taste contained the sharp tang of rot. Discreetly, I spat the mouthful back on to my plate, and with a fork I prodded the bolus of semi-chewed fish.

I was appalled to see a mangled conglomeration of piscine body parts reveal themselves on its tines. There were fish-bones, but these were black and oily; an eyeball, larger than one might expect from a cod, made opaque by the process of cooking, and most horrible of all, a fractured beak from an octopus, with a tiny green, decayed fish trapped within. Whatever had happened, this beast had been caught and killed while it was in the process of consuming a meal. Lord only knew why the chef hadn’t seen it while he was battering fillets in the kitchen.

I pushed the plate away and pressed a napkin to my lips. It’s all right, I thought to myself. I didn’t swallow any of that.

The first spots of rain came down, as if in sympathy with my mood. That rain front had whipped in double-quick to dissolve the furthest curve of the beach—about half a mile away—and send packing, in an ecstasy of flapping towels, the people from the sand.

The waitress returned and I told her what had happened. She seemed unimpressed by my story—more put out by the fact that I had regurgitated my meal. She cleared the table without the merest hint of remorse and asked me if I wanted anything else.

“Just the bill,” I retorted, and turned my attention back to the breakwater in time to see a man and woman locking their bikes against the railing, while a young boy of around three or four leaned against the lowest bar. I felt my guts loosen.

I’ve always hated heights, especially seeing others display a fearlessness of them such as those old photographs of men hopping around girders at the top of unfinished skyscrapers in New York.

The divers on the breakwater had decided to call it a day—one of them, a teenage girl in flip-flops and long blonde hair seemed lost, she walked up and down it as if she’d misplaced something.

The bay was emptying quite rapidly now as the grey deepened and the rain—an unpleasant driving mist—enveloped the whole of the beach and set the parasols fluttering. Lights came on.

The little boy fell.

I felt the thump of his body through my feet as he hit the sand. My heart skittered. He was still for a while, but then he began to move like someone coming out of deep sleep—squirming, flinching. His parents were still absorbed by their lock and had not seen the accident occur.

The sea was coming in—I could see it lapping at the boy’s feet, like something tasting him. The image—prompted by the unpleasant affair of my meal—disgusted me and I leapt upright, gesturing wildly at the couple on the breakwater. Nobody else had witnessed this. The boy could be lying there with a punctured lung, drowning on his own fluids while Mum and Dad bickered about how best to lock a bicycle to a post.

Now the boy found his voice and let out a cry. He was clearly hurt. The sound did not reach his parents. I hurried down the steps from the patio to the sand, ignoring the bleats of the waitress who had returned to present me with my bill.

As I rounded the first set of steps, a shoulder of the patio blocked out the view to the beach. In my peripheral vision—I was concentrating on my descent and did not want to follow the boy into A&E with a pratfall of my own—I saw a diabolically large shadow separate itself from the surface of the sea, close to where he was lying. It was muscular, gunmetal grey, carrying the sheen of something alive and purposeful.

I began to scream and shout, hollering like a madman, and the faces of the boy’s parents were tilted down to me as I rounded the final flight and reached the sand. As I had disturbed them from their obsession with the bike lock, so I had disturbed whatever it was that had risen from the sea.

Now there was just the boy, getting wetter as the tide foamed at his back. I yelled at the dozy idiots to get down to their poor child, and they whirled around like pantomime actors on a stage. Mum started wailing; Dad shouted “Billy! Billy!” in a desperate voice. I suddenly felt bad about raising my voice at them. A momentary loss of concentration and a child’s life was in the balance.

I got to him first, moments before the father.

“Don’t touch him!” I snapped, and he favoured me with a gaze to cook the skin off my bones. “He might have a bad break. If you lift him up it could be catastrophic.”

“He was right next to me,” the father said. “He was an inch away.”

“It’s these railings,” I said. “Fine for you and me, but they look like a climbing frame for children.”