Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

We crouched by Billy and managed to get him to tell us if he hurt anywhere. It soon became apparent that the relatively dampening effect of the sand and a child’s natural “bounciness” had resulted in little more than a bad fright.

“I’ll call an ambulance, if you want me to,” I offered.

“It’s okay,” said the mother, as she rocked her son and repeatedly kissed the top of his head. “We’ll drop by the hospital and get him seen to.”

They thanked me fulsomely and traipsed up to the main road. I felt the occasional pang I got when I see children playing, or being cuddled by their parents. A wishfulness, a wistfulness. The faint memory of tender, unconditional, filial love. And then it was gone, and I turned back to the ocean, which was being whipped into large combers of seething white.

I stared into it for some time, trying to convince myself that what I’d seen was strange shadow-play, a collision of the last glint of sunlight and the enveloping dark of the squall.

“You’re bitter,” a voice said.

“I beg your pardon?” I turned to see the waitress standing a few feet away, holding out a piece of paper.

“Your bitter,” she said. “You just have to pay for your bitter. No charge for the food.”

* * *

I went back to my bicycle and unlocked it. As I pedalled towards the village centre I caught sight of the blonde teenage girl wrapped in a dark blue towel. She was standing at the end of the breakwater and calling in a tiny, fragmented voice that was pulled this way and that by the wind: “Harry? Harry?”

V

MRS. COTTERHAM • THE POLICE MAKE SOME ENQUIRIES • AN INVITATION

I stopped in the village to buy stamps and to send my postcards. I spotted Mr. Gluckmann while I waited in the post office queue—he was talking animatedly to a man in a dark suit who held a clipboard. They were standing in front of an estate agent’s window. Mr. Gluckmann was wearing a long, grey raincoat, a hat, scarf and gloves. He looked like someone trying to conceal himself, and I wondered if that was what I would do if I suffered his skin condition or whether I would consider it a problem for the public to have to deal with. My attention was gradually drawn away from that strange old man to a conversation two women ahead of me in the queue were having about the Fisherman. Something had happened on the island, it transpired, that morning.

One of the women, whose hair was so white you’d be forgiven for expecting a light dusting of talc to spring from it at every movement she made, was pale with shock. “On your own doorstep,” she said. “Who would countenance such a thing?”

The other woman was more fatalistic. “Why should we be immune? You hear people say ‘Why me, why us?’ all the time and you have to ask the question, ‘Why not me, why not us?’”

Apparently a group of teenage revellers having a bonfire near the cliffs on the southern edge of the island had spotted a woman in the rocks, close to the airport. Her bright orange umbrella marked her out among the black teeth where she had been discarded, otherwise she might never have been discovered at all. A post-mortem was being carried out that afternoon, but everyone was convinced she would be the next notch on the Fisherman’s tally stick.

I was feeling tired by now; within an hour it would be dark and I didn’t want to be navigating those treacherous roads with the small, ineffectual lights on the bike. I set off back along the coastal road thinking of Clarissa, and the events of the day, and wondering if, after all, my dead wife would have liked it here.

Thanks to the weird, cruel way of the world, my journey back was just as tough and rigorous as the first leg, the wind having changed direction to beat me in the face as I fought against that long incline to the disintegration of the road, where the slope would turn in my favour, but the poor surface would keep me at a crawl until I reached the causeway. The light had turned gloomy by then, full of mud, so I could no longer see a clear break between the sky and the sea.

I returned the bike to the lean-to inside the gate and hurried back to my room, hoping to avoid the Cotterhams, but Alastair must have been waiting for me because he shot out of the door, his face wild, his normally well-groomed hair antic.

“Have you seen Penny?” he demanded. He said it in such a way as to make any denial seem redundant, yet deny it I had to.

“Not since this morning, when I left,” I said. “Why?”

Alastair studied me as if I must be lying, concealing something, and I thought: The Fisherman. No. No. Surely not.

“She’s missing,” he said. “She left this morning to go for a walk, clear her head—she suffers from these awful migraines—and I told her I would have breakfast ready for her return, but an hour went by, then two, and she didn’t come back.”

“Have you contacted the police? The coast guard?”