Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Angry with myself, I stripped the sheets and took another shower. It was a couple of hours until dawn, but I didn’t want to court sleep again, not with that poor woman dead and the spectre of Gluckmann so fresh in my thoughts. There would be no refreshing slumber now.

So I dressed and made tea and I took it up to the flagpole, where a cannon the best part of a hundred years old had been left to rust away, a reminder and perhaps a warning of what had occurred on this island during the war. The Union Jack whipped and smacked under assault from the wind. The Cotterhams must have been up to perform the ceremony. I imagined Penny trying to coax a tune from the bugle, the family laughing together at whatever squeaks and squawks flew into the night.

There was no sign of any lone swimmer in the ocean.

The hot drink inside me, I felt much happier. Despite the terror of the dream and the unpleasantness of the previous evening I felt buoyed, optimistic even. I was on the mend and not feeling any deleterious side effects from my hours cycling, beyond a slight rash and a not unpleasurable ache on the tops of my thighs.

I went down to the kitchen to find that at some time in the night Alastair had packed away the family things and vacated their rooms. There were two letters on the kitchen table addressed to me. One was from him, thanking me for my help and wishing me well, the other was from Mr. Standish, hoping that the unfortunate incident had not put me off the island, and asking whether I would like to accompany him—weather permitting—on a kayaking expedition that afternoon.

VI

MADMAN’S WOUND • STRIKING TRANSIT AND AN UNEXPECTED HAZARD • THE BONE BOOK

To ensure I spent my energies best on the paddle rather than the pedal, Mr. Standish had arranged for a car to pick me up. Nigel, his son, took me on the brief drive to Murène Bay, a broad beach with a half-mile crescent of sand and a protective wall that Nigel told me had been built during the German Occupation. Mr. Standish (“Call me Trevor, please”) was waiting, looking very keen and professional in what I’m led to believe is called a shorty wetsuit. No such apparel for me, but then I wasn’t intending to go in the water, as he was.

I was given a life jacket and a paddle and shown to my boat, a handsome thing with a transparent base, to better enjoy any marine life we might espy.

“Very sturdy, very stable boats, these,” Trevor assured me. “Honestly, you could do an Irish jig in it and it would barely move. The only problem is that, as a result, it’s a bit of a bugger to steer, so you have to work hard to turn left or right.”

I told him not to worry. I had done quite a bit of canoeing in the Bristol Channel when younger (a lot younger), but I felt confident in a boat (especially when I’d checked my pocket to make sure the hag stone was safely accompanying me) and once we’d set off and I got the feel of the vessel beneath me, we started making good time heading around the coast to investigate the many caves that ate into the sides of the island.

We were lucky with the wind. Where it had been savage during the nights, now it barely registered, and what sun there was licked my bare arms and felt good on my face. Streams of silver fish darted beneath the boat and it was all I could do to keep my attention on the rocks to make sure I didn’t come a cropper and put a hole in a very expensive bit of kit.

“Over here!” called Trevor.

I dutifully paddled over to him and he showed me a deep crevice channelling into the cliff-face. “Madman’s Wound,” he yelled (the gravelly, rasping cry of the gannets gliding around us was near deafening). “So-called because for a period of about twenty years in the eighteenth century it actually sealed itself shut, healed itself, you might say—some weird realignment of the rocks, tectonic shifting, minor earth tremor, nobody knows for sure—until about seventy years ago, when it mysteriously reappeared.”

“Is it safe to go in?”

“Today, yes, I think so. Usually no, because of the swift tides around here and the choppy waters.”

“Shall we?”

“If you’re feeling intrepid enough, of course.”

And so it was that we braved the currents and the rocks to breach that horrible aperture in the cliff-face which looked—I hesitate to say it in case it should make me appear downright strange—vaguely sexual, and travelled through a claustrophobically narrow and low tunnel (having to duck our heads on numerous occasions) until we reached a broadening space that bounced the echoes of the lapping waves and our wondrous voices back at us, along with the eye-watering stench of bat guano.

I felt myself become rather faint—there was no obvious vent in the interior to allow the air in here to be recycled—and had to bring the boat to a stop alongside a low outcrop of rock in order to hold myself steady. To lose consciousness here, in near darkness, was to invite a swift drowning.