Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“I’m not his keeper,” Martin said. He was having a quiet pint and a pastie, and thinking about whether to shut up shop for a couple of weeks and go on holiday. The only customer he’d had all morning had been a confused old lady who, after poking about in the bins for ten minutes, had asked him if he had any Ken Dodd records. Scotland, perhaps. Apparently it had rained somewhere in Scotland only yesterday.

The grebo peered at Martin through a shroud of long, lank hair. He was barefoot, barechested under his filthy afghan coat, and stank like a goat. “I got something for him. The stuff he’s been waiting for. You know.”

“Not really,” Martin said, and remembered that Dr. John had mentioned something about expecting a delivery of hash.

“We had a deal, right, so I went round to his flat and he wasn’t there, and I’ve been waiting two whole fucking hours here, and now I have to go down the social and sign on. When you see him, tell him I was looking for him,” the grebo said, and lurched off without giving his name.

That evening, after he’d closed up his shop, Martin made a detour on the way home, to call on Dr. John. He told himself that his friend was probably in the middle of one of his forty-eight hour sleepathons, but there was no harm checking. Just in case. He leaned on Dr. John’s doorbell for five minutes, listening to it trill two floors above him, then went down the whitewashed steps and rang the bell of the private members club in the basement. It was owned by Dr. John’s landlord, Mr. Mavros, an after-hours drinking spot featuring sticky purple shagpile and red leatherette booths. Martin had worked behind its bar last year, when he’d been scraping together enough seed money for his record shop.

“I hope this doesn’t mean trouble for me,” Mr. Mavros said, after he had handed over the key to Dr. John’s flat.

“He’s ill,” Martin lied. “I said I’d stop by and see if he needed anything. Soup or aspirin or whatever.”

“He look ill when I see him,” Mr. Mavros said. He was a thin, consumptive man with no hair on his head except for a splendid pair of thick black eyebrows. He wore red braces over his immaculate white shirt, and as usual a small cigar was plugged into the corner of his mouth. “He come back from somewhere when I was locking up this place, two o’clock in the morning. I say hello and he look straight past me. Into the distance, like he see something that isn’t there. I know he drink, he smoke dope, but this was different. You tell him, Martin, if he start on the hard drugs, if he cause me trouble, that’s it, I throw him out.”

The door to Dr. John’s tiny flat stood ajar. The bed-sitting room was hot and stale. Sunlight burned at the edges of the drawn curtains. The bed was piled with cushions and dirty clothes; the floor was strewn with clothes and broken-backed paperbacks, unsleeved records and record sleeves, empty cans and bottles, tin-foil takeaway cartons, and yellowing newspapers. In the filthy little kitchen, the tap was running over a stack of unwashed dishes and pots. Martin turned it off, heard something splash somewhere else in the flat. He called out, felt a jolt of nerves when there was another splash.

The bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole just big enough for bath and bog and wash-basin. The light was off, and it smelt like the seal pool in the zoo. The bath was brimful, and in the semi-darkness Martin could see a shape under the shivering surface of the water.

“John?”

A pale hand lifted like a lily; water cascaded over the edge of the tub. Martin jerked the light cord with a convulsive movement and in the sudden harsh glare of the unshielded bulb the boy in the bathtub—fully clothed, in the same brown, chalkstripe waistcoat he’d been wearing at the Free Festival—sat bolt upright, eyes wide, water running out of his nose and mouth.

Martin helped the boy out of the tub and got him onto the bed, but he wouldn’t answer any of Martin’s questions about Dr. John, and quickly fell into something deeper than sleep. He breathed with his mouth open, making a rasping gurgle, and didn’t stir when Martin went through his pockets, finding nothing but a couple of pound notes wadded together in a knot of papier-mâché. Martin suddenly found that he couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer with this unquiet sleeper in the hot, claustrophobic flat, and fled into the late-afternoon sunlight and the diesel dust and ordinary noise of traffic.

He sat on the bench beside a telephone box on the other side of the road and thought about his options. If he told Mr. Mavros what he’d found, the landlord would probably throw out the boy and change the lock on the door. And if he went to the police, they’d probably make a note of Dr. John’s disappearance and forget all about it. He could always walk away, of course, but Dr. John was a friend who had helped him out of a tight spot, and he had a vague but nagging sense of duty.