Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I tried leaning over the parapet in the courtyard fronting the quarters, but I could see nothing untoward. Then I remembered the Outpost, and the more expansive view the disintegrated walkway allowed of the bay. I put down my mug and clambered back up through the samphire to the narrow corridor and negotiated once more the mesh barriers and warning signs.

A shadow moved across the open doorway of that separated room.

I stared, barely able to breathe, and tried to convince myself I had not seen it. But then terrible sounds came to me from the black shadows of the open window and that gaping doorway. The tiny room ought not to have been able to produce the kind of acoustics that caused the sounds to carry, but here they came—moist, tearing noises. And beneath them, muttered, but with a kind of religious intensity, I heard words. They were words I’d never heard before—and never want to hear again—but I couldn’t replicate them here. They sounded foreign, wildly alien even, but somehow rooted to reality, an Earth I knew from folklore, or race memory or some-such.

Forgive me if I ramble, but it’s difficult for me to explain. I come from a modest background, a family that lived on the breadline for many years, after the hardships of World War II. I didn’t see a banana until I was in my teenage years. So this kind of peculiarity left me stunned, scared. It didn’t fit into any pattern I recognised.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to recognise. I wanted to block it out, forget it, refuse to acknowledge that anything like this could occur in a world I thought I’d got the hang of during my time in it. But I stood there and I listened and I cringed under the weight of those impossible words and the crimson sounds in which they were couched. There was injury and death and meanness in every plosive, fricative and aspiration.

Without realising it I had started crying. I felt like a child who had strayed into a room where grown-ups were fighting, or making violent love. I didn’t understand.

I began to edge back from the gap in the rock. I didn’t trust myself not to give away my position via some pathetic whimper, or pratfall.

I’d like to think, as I turned and plunged back towards that lockable fortified room, that cell of mine, that the stink coming off the waves was being pushed from Les Etacs, where the gannets turned the rock white in more ways than one, but I knew the odour was pulsing from the Outpost.

And I had to keep thinking of the smell, otherwise my mind would fasten on to the sight of something loose, like a grey sack, flopping across the doorway and being dragged away. A sack unfit for any kind of business, it was so full of holes. A sack, after all, though, yes. A sack it was.

I fought with the urge to try to escape, to cast my luck upon the depth of water on the causeway, and the hope that the current was not as keen as it looked. Come dawn, not three hours away, the waters would have retreated and I would be able to cross to the mainland and leave this wretched place for good.

I sat on my bed, fully dressed, gripping a bar from one of the loose bunk rails, my eyes glued to the handle of the door. I didn’t move for the rest of the night and, because the light came back to the room so stealthily, did not realise it was morning until, yawning, I felt my back crackle as if my spine had been taken from me during those cold, lonely hours, and replaced with a giant icicle. I was stiff all over, my neck bright with pain whenever I turned my head.

I put down the bar and went to the window, pulled back the curtains. Grey sky, grey sea. Les Etacs was engulfed with wings. The waves were topped with scimitars of foam, as if the sea were trying to copy the shape of the birds it stared at all day. Against my better judgement, I unlocked the door and stepped outside.

The wind was little more than playful this morning, exhausted from last night’s violence. I stared up at the little mound that prefaced the corridor to the Outpost and, though I desperately wanted to assuage my suspicion, my legs simply would not carry me back up there.

The beeping of a car horn.

I went back to my room and grabbed my packed suitcase. In that moment I felt my heart beating, but I was kidded into thinking it was a strong, healthy pulse—rather it was the flesh that carried it, grown weak over the decades, amplifying every pathetic rinse and suck of blood. Yet strangely, I was no longer afraid of that tardy muscle, sitting withered and wounded in its cage.

You are no threat to us…

I realised there were lots of other things to be fearful of in this world, and, in many ways, thank God, it had taken me a lifetime to discern it.