Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

When he came off, sweating hard after two encores, the rhythm guitarist of Clouds of Memory got in his face, saying something about his loser friend spiking beer. Martin brushed him off and went to look for Dr. John. There was no sign of him, backstage or front. The crowd was beginning to drift away. Two men in black uniforms had opened the back doors of the ambulance and were packing away their first aid kit. The girl was gone.

* * *

Martin didn’t think any more about it until early the next morning, when he was woken by the doorbell. It was Monday morning, ten to eight, already stiflingly hot, and Martin had a hangover from the post-gig pub session with the guys from Sea Change and their wives and girlfriends and hangers-on. When the bell rang he put a pillow over his head, but the bell just wouldn’t quit, a steady drilling that resonated at the core of his headache. Clearly, some moron had SuperGlued his finger to the bell push, and at last Martin got up and padded into the living room and looked out of the window to see who it was.

Martin’s flat was on the top floor of a house in the middle of Worcester Terrace, a row of Georgian houses that the professional middle classes were beginning to reclaim from decades of low rent squalor. Four storeys below, Dr. John stood like a smudge of soot on the clean white doorstep, looking up and waving cheerfully when Martin asked him if he’d lost his mind.

“I’ve had a bit of an adventure,” he shouted.

Martin put his keys in a sock and threw them down. By the time his visitor had laboured up the stairs he was dressed and in the kitchen, making tea. Dr. John stood in the doorway, making a noise like a deflating set of bagpipes. He had turned a colour normally associated with aubergines or baboons’ bottoms. When he had his breath back, he said, “You should find somewhere nearer the ground. I think I have altitude sickness.”

“I should punch you in the snout.”

“Whatever it is you think I did, I didn’t do it.” Dr. John flopped heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs. He had the bright eyes and clenched jaw of a speed buzz. There was fresh mud on the knees of his jeans. Grass stains on his denim jacket; a leafy twig in his bird’s nest hair.

“Then you didn’t spike Simon Cowley’s beer.”

“Oh, that.” Dr. John opened a Virginia tobacco tin and took out a roll-up. “Yeah, I did that. You have bacon and eggs to go with this tea?”

“If I had any bacon Id give you bacon and eggs if I had any eggs.”

Dr. John lit the roll-up and looked around the little kitchen. “I see you have cornflakes.”

“Knock yourself out. What did you spike him with?”

“The herbal shit I scored off that girl.” Dr. John poured milk over the bowlful of cornflakes. “Is that hot chocolate I see by the kettle?”

“So you blew your reputation as a professional drug-dealer to check out this hippy chick.”

Dr. John shook chocolate powder over his cornflakes. “My curiosity was piqued.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“She handed it over without a word. Check it out.” Dr. John fished something from the pocket of his denim jacket and showed it to Martin. It was the size of his thumbnail and crudely pressed from a greenish paste; it looked more like a bird-dropping than a pill. “Weird-looking shit, huh? So weird, in fact, that even I wouldn’t take it without testing it first. So I broke off the smallest little sliver and dropped it in Mr. UFO’s beer.”

“Too much acid has fried your brains.”

“But in the best possible way.” Dr. John was bent over the bowl, spooning up chocolate powder/milk/cornflakes mix. The roll-up was still glued to the corner of his mouth. Although the window was open, his funky odour filled the kitchen. “So, did my freebie take your wanky friend to somewhere good?”

“Good enough for his pal to know he’d been spiked.”

“It didn’t give him fits, make him foam at the mouth, make him sing in tune?”

“I didn’t hang around to find out. He just looked very spaced. Had a thousand yard stare and a stupid grin.”

“Cool. Maybe I’ll give it a test flight this afternoon. Make me some more tea, man, and I’ll tell you about the girl.”

Dr. John said that he had followed her across the Downs into the wild strip of woods along the edge of the Avon Gorge. “She was like an elf, man. Breezed through those fucking woods as if she was born to it.”

“So she isn’t the front for Turkish gangsters. She really is just some crazy hippy.”