Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“You know,” he said, “there are a lot of fishermen around here who invest great stock in the idea of holy stones protecting their boats? They tie them to nails hammered into the bows, near the gunwale. It is believed these stones ward off the approach of witches, or witch-directed spirits. Those that decide not to tie a stone to their vessel, or do not position it carefully, might not land as many fish. If they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky? Well, there are a lot of wrecks in these waters. A lot of unrecovered fishermen swaying in time to those deep ocean currents.”

Something flopped over the lip of one of the baskets. Long, spiny feelers, or, God forbid, fingers. As far removed from human as you could pray for. They clacked together, stiff but with some yield to them, and they were wet with some kind of slime, like the thick, bubbled spit worked up within the maws of crabs or lobsters. Mr. Gluckmann slapped at them with his hand and they retreated.

“How is your house-hunting going?” I asked. All of the baskets were rattling now—I saw movement within each one. Some were being stretched as whatever squirmed inside extended itself. The membrane thinned, whitening as claw or pincer or tooth became embossed against it.

Mr. Gluckmann rubbed at his cheek and the layers of flab there shivered. I wouldn’t have been surprised, had he teased them open, to see a set of gills arranged across the flesh. “We walk among you now,” he said. “It has been so long.”

Behind him the sea began to boil. I forced myself to look away, certain that my meagre faculties would not be able to cope with the sight of the thing—beyond massive—that could cause such a churning. I pulled the stone from my pocket and Mr. Gluckmann began to jangle and jerk like a marionette. Those baskets—those wombs—which I now saw were not merely looped over and around his body, but attached to Gluckmann’s skin, were swelling by the minute. Soon they would not be able to contain their inhabitants.

A shadow fell across the world, and the odour of something unimaginably old hit me like a wall. I felt the coil and slither of gigantic tentacles test my limbs from all angles. And slowly, inexorably, I was drawn towards the sea. At my back I felt the heat of jaws I refused to countenance.

The last thing I saw was Mr. Gluckmann carrying his crowning babies as he waddled towards the town and its unsuspecting population. “You are no threat to us,” he said, “damned as you are by the cage of your own mortality.”

* * *

Somehow I had become tangled in the blankets and sheets that formed my temporary bed. I was hot and sweaty, the stone in my hand threatening to slip from my grasp. It took a moment to orient myself, but in the end I was just glad to be anywhere other than in the grip of some terrible, benthic creature eager on adding me to the contents of its belly.

What a nightmare. The most horrible, the most vivid I have ever encountered in my three score years and ten.

What was worse was that only two hours had gone by since deciding to go to bed. Muscles aching, but sleep now as likely as Clarissa’s return, I padded to the kitchen and set about making myself a mug of hot milk.

The weather remained squally—spits of rain (or maybe even fragments of shingle and surf tossed up by the tantrum winds) clattered against the windows. I shrugged on my coat and, hot drink in hand, unbolted the door.

It was piercingly cold; within seconds my milk had been cooled to a drinkable temperature.

We walk among you now.

I shuddered. What was that dream all about? Some weird idea, fuelled by too much red wine and seafood, of a world being gradually overtaken by an army of amphibious Mr. Gluckmanns? Utterly preposterous, yet I felt vaguely proud of the breadth of my imagination. Surely my ongoing fear of dementia was a long way off yet.

I thought about the object I’d found in the cave. That weird, fishy book, if it could be called such a thing. I found myself thinking I was lucky to have thrown it back to the sea. It seemed unthinkable now that I might have taken it for good.

At the hatch in the gate I peered down towards the causeway and saw, with dismay, that the sea had completely cut me off from the mainland. Waves crashed up against the car park where I had trundled my cycle not twelve hours previously. I eyed that dark stretch feverishly, but there was nothing in it, or of it, that caught my attention. Nor would there be beyond limpets, seaweed and crabs. The most exotic thing found at these latitudes were conger eel and smooth-hound. Perhaps the odd seal.

I set my jaw against the weather and the water and drew an imaginary line under my fear. Come dawn, I would be shot of the place.

Turning back to the promise of warmth, I heard a sound under the racket of the sky and ocean that gave me pause. It sounded like crumbling masonry, but the walls here were sound as far as I could see. Rocks then? Peeling away from the cliff-face under scrutiny from the buffeting wind?