Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

The creature beneath the surface had changed its posture. It had assumed some sort of attitude of attack—everything sharp on its body curved towards me. I tossed the ‘book’ into the surf and wiped my hands against my jacket. Just some oddity created by a personage with too much time on their hands and an unhealthy relationship with things best left below the surface of the sea.

Nevertheless, the creature was besotted by it: I watched it follow the book as it sank to the shadows. The only thing to suggest any kind of living being had been within my vicinity was a stream of silver bubbles torrenting up from the deep.

Back at shore Trevor helped me drag the boat on to the sand.

“Are you okay, old chap?” he asked.

I nodded, incapable of speech. If I’d tried to say anything, I would have been violently sick. Eventually I was able to thank Trevor for allowing me to accompany him on his adventure (though I wanted to do anything but), blaming my pallor on my age. I’d been overdoing it, despite my overall feelings of good health. He drove me back to Fort Requin and I was horrified to see the sea lapping at the causeway, the beach where I had walked and unearthed the hag stone now covered completely by water.

“High tides,” he explained, unnecessarily. “But you’ll be quite all right inside those thick walls. The sea will have retreated by morning.”

He drove expertly through the surf, knowing instinctively where the road was, though I could see nothing beneath that shifting, hungry body. He dropped me off and waved goodbye, and I watched him churn through the water back to St. Anne.

Darkness was coming on and I suddenly felt very alone, and utterly certain that I wanted to leave. I should have asked him to take me to the airport. At the very least I might have asked him to stay with me that night, to provide company and beggar the fact he’d have thought me a nervous ninny.

I locked and bolted the gate, ditto the door to the kitchen. I was determined to spend the night in there rather than the chilly Soldiers’ Quarters with its unfettered vista of the ocean. I’d had quite a bellyful of the sea. I was looking forward to getting back to the dry, landlocked interior of Leicestershire.

I made myself a cup of tea and carried it to the sofa, where I made a den from the blankets and pillows from the bed Ralph had vacated (I found one of his comics that had fallen down the side; it upset me disproportionately). A long, sound sleep and then in the morning I would see about making preparations for my departure. Trevor Standish could have no qualms about reimbursement—my convalescence was predicated upon calm and rest. I’d encountered neither. I’m sure he would not like to have a heart attack as well as a murdered guest on his hands.

I turned out the light and wriggled down into my shelter—the sofa was long and deep. Rain rattled briefly at the windowpanes like the nails of someone demanding entry. I willed sleep to come. I did not want another night of anxiety. Usually, when I wanted slumber to envelop me, I thought of water. I imagined myself as a smooth, dark pebble thrown into deep water. By the time I hit the ground I would be snoozing contentedly.

Water, though, was the thing I least wanted to think about. I didn’t like what it concealed here. I didn’t appreciate the way it had erased the concourse and trapped me in this cold, forbidding place. They could dress it up as much as they liked—pretty curtains, fancy soaps in the dish by the bath—it was still a place where soldiers had marched, with their guns and their knives and grenades, death on their minds.

At least, I comforted myself, I was in a place that had been designed to be well-nigh impregnable. The walls in parts of this structure were almost twenty feet thick. Do your worst, Mr. Gluckmann, I thought. Do your damnedest.

VII

THE OUTPOST (II) • THE EYE OF THE STONE

“The hag stone, it finds you. You do not find it.”

I felt my neck snap as I jerked upright at the deep, clotted voice. Mr. Gluckmann was standing knee-deep in the surf, his baskets hanging glutinously around his hips like oilcloth canteens. What hair remained on his head hung limp and grey. His mouth was much wider than I had initially thought, the corners slack and encrusted with dried salt. His lips glistened, pursing obscenely. It was a mouth that looked like something big and meaty you might unlock from the seized shell of a bivalve.

His eyes, round and black, were fast upon my pocket. I felt the stone within cold against my thigh, as if it were the intensity of his gaze that was reducing its temperature.