Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“She might have been crazy, but she really could move. Floated right down those steep narrow paths to the bottom of the gorge in about a minute flat. I got stuck halfway, saw her cross the road at the bottom, saw her climbing over the rail on the other side, down to the river.” Dr. John lit a fresh roll-up and looked at Martin, suddenly serious. “You know how the Avon is almost dried up because of the drought? There’s grass growing on the mud, and where grass isn’t growing it’s all dry and cracked. She walked over that shit, man, straight towards what’s left of the river. Then a couple of lorries went past, and when they were gone she wasn’t there any more.”

“She jumped into the river? Come on.”

“One moment she was walking across those mud flats, and then those bastard lorries came along, and she was gone, that’s all I know.”

“Let me get this straight. She was giving away some kind of drug for free, and then she was struck by a fit of remorse, so she walked down to the river and drowned herself.”

Martin, used to Dr. John’s fantastic stories, reckoned that about half of what he’d been told was true. He believed that his friend had tried to follow the girl and lost her in the woods; the rest was just the usual bullshit embellishment.

“I don’t know what her motivation was, man. I only know what I saw.”

“You didn’t go look for her? Or call the police?”

“I was on this dead-end path halfway up the side of the fucking gorge. I couldn’t go any further, all I could do was climb up and start over, and if she reappeared while I was finding a new way down I would have missed her. So I sat there and kept watch, but the light was going, and I didn’t see her again, and after a bit I suppose I fell asleep. Woke up this morning covered in dew, with this bastard headache.”

“Let me guess: while you were keeping a look-out for this girl, you finished off your party cocktail.”

“It was my only sustenance, man. I wasn’t about to start eating leaves.”

“Well, look on the bright side. If she did drown herself, you don’t have to worry that she’ll steal your customers.”

“You don’t believe me. That’s cool. But I viddied it, brother, with my own glazzies. She walked over the mud and then she... Shit!”

Dr. John’s chair went over as he pushed away from the table. Martin turned, saw the bird on the stone ledge outside the window. His first thought was that it was a gull, but although it was the right mix of white and grey, it was twice the size of any ordinary gull, and sort of lop-sided, and stank horribly, like rotten meat and low-tide sewage. When he reached out to shut the window, it fixed him with a mad red eye and snapped at his hand, its sharp yellow bill splintering the window frame when he snatched his fingers away. Then it stretched its wings (one seemed longer than the other, and both had growths, bat-like claws, at their joints) and dropped away in a half-turn and floated out across the communal gardens of the terrace, a white speck dwindling away towards the docks.

* * *

Dr. John kept glancing up at the sky as he walked with Martin up the hill towards the centre of Clifton. He was convinced that the bird had something to do with the girl. “It was a spy, man. A mutant gull from the lower depths of wherever she came from.”

“It had some sort of disease,” Martin said.

Dr. John turned a full circle, his face tipped skywards, and said in a sonorous film trailer baritone, “A mutant gull on a mission from Hell.”

“You see pigeons with parts of their feet missing all the time. It’s something to do with walking on pavements.”

Dr. John laughed. “You’re so straight, man, they could use you as a ruler.”

“Maybe it ate a bad kebab on a rubbish tip.”

“Maybe it ate one of the Tap’s mystery meat pies. I’m pretty sure they’ve fried my chromosomes.” Dr. John did a lurching Frankenstein walk for a few steps, arms held straight out, eyes rolled back.

They parted by the tidy park landscaped around the ruins of a church that had been hit by a German bomb during Bristol’s Blitz. Dr. John said he was going to go home and drop that pill and see where it took him.

“Don’t be crazy,” Martin said.

“It’s all part of my ongoing exploration of inner space, man. Cheaper than TV and a lot more fun.”

“It’s probably made out of hemlock and lead paint. Weedkiller and rat snot.”

“Don’t be such a worrywart. There isn’t a pill or powder I can’t handle,” Dr. John said, and sloped off across the grassy space, a squat stubborn figure listing slightly to the left.

* * *

The next day, lunchtime in the Coronation Tap, one of Dr. John’s grebo pals lurched up to Martin and asked where the little fucker was hiding himself.