Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Snaith shook his head. “That’s the damnable thing. How are we going to explain this to high authority?”

“But it must be murder,” Kent went on.

Carson shook his head. “Quite impossible. The house was securely locked for the night. As I said on the phone, we had to get the key from the housekeeper. We made extensive searches from top to bottom of the mill. No one had been here apart from Roberts.”

“But the water,” Kent went on desperately. “Perhaps the mill wheel...”

One of the plain-clothes men stepped forward. “We had a frogman under there, sir. That wheel has been inoperable for at least thirty years. It is secured by steel bolts and great chains.”

Kent persisted in his questions though he knew he was being ridiculous. He turned back to Carson. “Could something like a shark have escaped from an aquarium and come down the stream?”

The Inspector would have laughed had the situation not been so macabre and horrific in its implications. “Quite impossible. Even if you were correct, nothing large enough to have inflicted such terrible injuries. There are massive iron grilles each side of the mill. They go right down to the bed of the stream. The steel has no rust and the grilles would merely let small fish get through. The water’s only about eight or ten feet deep anyway.” He resumed his brisk manner. “You chaps carry on. We’ll try to sort out all this mess later. Mr Kent has had a shock and it’s necessary to get him back to normal surroundings.”

A dazed Kent was led gently upstairs and into the familiar study where he took another tumbler of whisky with as little effect as though it had been water. His sane, everyday world had collapsed about him. He was seized by a sudden fit of trembling and almost fell into the leather chair to which Carson led him.

He was not to know at that stage of Roberts’ obscene diary entries hidden in a recess of the desk or of the vile painting of some loathsome thing under the sheeted canvas in the studio.

And thereafter he could never bear the sound of running water.

ANOTHER FISH STORY

by

KIM NEWMAN

IN THE SUMMER of 1968, while walking across America, he came across the skeleton fossil of something aquatic. All around, even in the apparent emptiness, were signs of the life that had passed this way. Million-year-old seashells were strewn across the empty heart of California, along with flattened bullet casings from the ragged edge of the Wild West and occasional sticks of weathered furniture. The sturdier pieces were pioneer jetsam, dumped by exhausted covered wagons during a long dry desert stretch on the road to El Dorado. The more recent items had been thrown off overloaded trucks in the ’30s, by Okies rattling towards orange groves and federal work programs.

He squatted over the bones. The sands parted, disclosing the whole of the creature. The scuttle-shaped skull was all saucer-sized eye-sockets and triangular, saw-toothed jaw. The long body was like something fished out of an ash-can by a cartoon cat—fans of rib-spindles tapering to a flat tail. What looked like arm-bones fixed to the dorsal spine by complex plates that were evolving towards becoming shoulders. Stranded when the seas receded from the Mojave, the thing had lain ever closer to the surface, waiting to be revealed by sand-riffling winds. Uncovered as he was walking to it, the fossil—exposed to the thin, dry air—was quickly resolving into sand and scraps.

Finally, only an arm remained. Short and stubby like an alligator leg, it had distinct, barb-tipped fingers. It pointed like a sign-post, to the West, to the Pacific, to the city-stain seeping out from the original blot of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. He expected these route-marks. He’d been following them since he first crawled out of a muddy river in England. This one scratched at him.

Even in the desert, he could smell river-mud, taste foul water, feel the tidal pull.

For a moment, he was under waters. Cars, upside down above him, descended gently like dead, settling sharks. People floated like broken dolls just under the shimmering, sunlit ceiling-surface. An enormous pressure squeezed in on him, jamming thumbs against his open eyes, forcing liquid salt into mouth and nose. A tubular serpent, the size of a streamlined train, slithered over the desert-bed towards him, eyes like turquoise-shaded searchlights, shifting rocks out of its way with muscular arms.

Gone. Over.

The insight passed. He gasped reflexively for air.