Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

The shock of that thought helped revive me a little; but not as much as the inadvertent placing of my hand on something both horrible and yet strangely familiar. I thought I’d simply touched a pile of waste—more of that stinking ordure, most probably, or the body of a bat that had reached the end of its life and was settling into putrescence. But this possessed uniform shape, despite its revolting, organic yield beneath my fingers.

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d scooped up the queer artefact and hidden it beneath the seat of my boat. My heart was drumming—I felt as though I’d committed a crime. I heard Trevor yap on about the cave without taking any of it in, beyond the mention of it being rumoured to be a location for ceremonies involving pagans making sacrifices to the sea.

When his lecture had run its course, we navigated a route back out into open water and wearily paddled back to shore. I was tuckered out, but I felt good. Fresh sea air and honest exertion had repaired me, I believed.

“Look!” called Trevor. I followed the trajectory of his pointing finger and saw what at first glance looked like a lighthouse striped black and white on a promontory of rock fronting one of the smaller islands. But it was far too small and at the top, where there ought to have been a light, was more like a turret.

“Striking transit,” Trevor explained. “If you line that up with the white tower behind, so it’s blocked from sight, it means you’re in the vicinity of a hazard. Underwater rocks that will tear a hole in a ship like a witch’s claw through a pair of tights.”

We paddled carefully over to the area the striking transit was warning us about. “See?” Trevor yelled, his face intent on the transparent base of his boat. I stared down at the seemingly limitless green-grey sea and felt a twinge of vertigo at the thought of all that depth.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“You’ll see it in a minute, just keep drifting this way.”

I used the paddle as a rudder to steer closer to Trevor’s position, and flinched in shock as a cluster of sharp black jags of rocks appeared like thrusting fingers, inches away from the hull.

“Impressive, no?” As he made for shore, Trevor was grinning like a schoolboy who had found a rude magazine. I nodded and began to paddle to catch up with him. A glint of light caught my eye; no natural play of sunlight this… It was a soft, strangely greasy light coming from within the water—not a reflection, or a glint of scales on the silver flank of a mackerel.

I’d never seen its like before. It seemed to be some freak conglomeration of limbs and fins and, yes, mouths. A hideous collision of terrifying sea creatures, as if many different breeds had somehow managed to find a way to make the worst of their genes apparent in their offspring. It was devilish, unholy. Massive. And it was coming towards me.

It was finning its way around the treacherous columns of rock, moving much more swiftly than its awkward bulk should have allowed. The light came from odd, fleshy baskets arranged around and across its torso, similar to those I’d seen on Gluckmann in my dreams. Scraps of hairy skin—weird ‘lids’—flapped back and forth on top of them, allowing a view of what lay coiled inside: wet, dark things with grinning jaws that flashed in deep, layered triangles of silver. Shark mouths on human embryos—my nightmares given oxygen. I hadn’t been dreaming. I’d predicted this, or been channelled some hellish vision after meeting Gluckmann that night.

The speed of it.

It changed direction with the dizzying immediacy of a shoal of herring. I saw a strange mix of fin and hand rise up momentarily, splayed as a brake was applied to its progress, and it was like a pale starfish, webbed, peppered with tiny barnacles. It stared up at me with ancient, anemone-encrusted eyes, then at the thing I’d stolen from the cave, and I felt my knees began to shake uncontrollably with fear—they began spanking uncontrollably against the side of the kayak. What had I done?

Trevor was ahead of me now, so did not see me reach down to pick up my find. I thought my capacity for surprise had been blunted over the past few days, but here was another shock. I felt the wind belted from me as I beheld what could only be described as a book fashioned from the sea—its covers a melange of fish-skin, scales, fins and needle-bones. An eye stared lifeless, opaque, from one corner. The whole had been varnished with some kind of foul-smelling lacquer; it shone like the creamy, nacreous innards of an oyster shell.

I turned the ‘pages’ and a rotten nam pla odour assaulted me like slaps across the face. Mashed, dried fish, teeth and tentacles. Crushed octopus beaks. Frills and gills and suckers. No words. I felt each page as if there might be some braille-like sense to be gleaned from them, but I received nothing for my labour but the stomach-turning reek of decay and the jab of spines into my skin.

How long had it been there in the oily shadows of the cave?