Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Eighteen months later, Martin was with his friends in the middle of the crowd coming out of the Watershed at the end of a Clash concert, his ears ringing and sweat turning cold on his skin under his ripped T-shirt and Oxfam jacket and straight-legged Levis 501s, when someone caught his arm and called his name. Martin turned, saw a guy in a black dufflecoat, short blond hair and a pinched white face, and after a couple of seconds recognised Simon Cowley.

Martin told his friends that he’d catch up with them in the pub, and said to Simon, “I never thought you’d be into punk rock.”

“I’m not really here for the music.”

Martin grinned. He was still pumped up by the concert’s energy. “You missed something tremendous.”

“I heard about your friend.”

“Come to gloat, have you? Come to say ‘I told you so’?”

“Actually, I came to say I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I also heard you gave up your shop, you joined a group, you have a record deal...”

“Those people I was with? That’s the group. And the deal, it’s for a single with Rough Trade. Nothing major,” Martin said, “but we all had three-day hangovers after we signed.”

“Still, a record deal.”

“Yeah. How about you? I mean, I heard you broke up Clouds of Memory...”

“I gave all that up.” Simon hesitated, then said, almost shyly, “Want to see something?”

“You don’t look well, Simon. What have you been doing since...”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve been working. I’ve been waking up every night from bad dreams.”

“I get those too, sometimes.” But Martin didn’t want to talk about that; didn’t want to talk about anything to do with those awful days in that long hot summer. “Well, it was nice to run into you—”

“I’d really like you to see this. Apart from me, you’re the only person who’ll understand what it means. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

“Only a minute, then,” Martin said, and with a sense of foreboding followed Simon to the quay on the other side of the Watershed. Black water lapped a few feet below the edge of the walkway, flexing its patchwork covering of chip papers and beer cans and plastic detergent bottles. Martin shivered in the icy breeze that cut across the water, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and said, “What are we looking for?”

Simon put a finger to his lips, pointed at the water.

They were like tadpoles grown to the size of late-term human embryos. They were pale and faintly luminous, with heavy heads and large, black, lidless eyes and small pursed mouths. Skinny arms folded under pulsing gill slits. Snakey, finned tails. They hung in the black water at different levels.

Martin stared at them, little chills chasing each other through his blood, and whispered, “What are they?”

“Ghosts, maybe. Or shells, some kind of energy cast off when, you know...”

When the people had been taken. When they had been consumed. Snapped up. Devoured. No bodies had been found; fourteen people had simply disappeared, as people sometimes do. Most of them were like Dr. John, chancers on the edge of society, missed by no one but their landlords and dealers and parole officers. There’d been some fuss in the local news about a housewife and a schoolboy who’d both gone missing the same day, but no one had made the connection between the two, and the story soon slipped off the pages. And that might have been the end of it, except that six months later the flat below Dr. John’s was flooded; when he went to investigate, Mr. Mavros found Dr. John lying fully clothed in his overflowing bath, dead of a heroin overdose. Dr. John’s parents had disowned him long ago. Only Martin and Mr. Mavros had attended the cremation, and Martin had scattered the ashes off the suspension bridge. And that, he thought, really had been the end of it, except for the dreams. Except for these ghosts, pale in the black water.

“I think they come for the music,” Simon said. “Or maybe for what the music does to people. A concert is a kind of collective act of worship, isn’t it? Maybe they feed on it...”

There were six or seven or eight of them. They looked up at Martin and Simon through the water and the floating litter.

“There used to be more,” Simon said.

“Isn’t one of them sort of listing to the left?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

Simon said, “I tried to catch one once. I borrowed a keep net from my dad. They slipped right through it.”

Martin said, “Afterwards, I found one of those pills in my pocket.”

“Did you take it?”

“What would be the point?”

He’d flushed it down the sink. It had dissolved reluctantly, frothing slimy bubbles like a salted slug and giving off a vile stink that had reminded him of gull-shit. Dr. John had been right: it hadn’t been meant for him. Dr. John and the others had been on the road to oblivion long before they’d been snared by the monster or old god or whatever it was that had been briefly trapped in the tidal mud of the Avon. If it hadn’t taken them, something else would: an unlit gas oven; a razorblade and a warm bath; a swan dive from the suspension bridge; an overdose.