Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Martin had brushed against it and lived, but he’d been changed, no doubt about it. He’d given up his second-hand record shop and his nice flat with its convenient location and its view across the communal gardens towards the green breast of Jacob’s Hill, and moved into a squat with the rest of his new band. He was happy there and gave himself one hundred per cent to his music, even though he was pretty sure, despite the record deal, it wouldn’t last. But that didn’t matter. He was only twenty-six, for God’s sake. There was plenty of time to move on, to try something else.

He stood with Simon in the dark and the chill wind and watched the ghostly things in the water fade away.

“Sometimes I can almost hear them, you know?” Simon said. “I can almost understand what they’re trying to tell me.”

“It might be an idea to try to forget about them.”

Simon sighed, shivered inside his duffel coat, tried to smile. “I never thought I’d say this, but you’re probably right.”

“Want to come and have a drink with me?”

“I have to get the last bus home.” Simon had that uncharacteristic shy look again. “I’m getting married in a couple of months. My fiancée will be waiting up for me.”

“Congratulations,” Martin said, and discovered that he meant it.

“Maybe we’ll have that drink some other time,” Simon said, and they shook hands at the edge of the water and went their different ways into the city, into the rest of their lives.

THE COMING

by

HUGH B. CAVE

KEITH WALKER WAS one of five passengers in the Reverend Ralph Beckford’s station wagon that Sunday afternoon as it began its low-gear descent down The Devil’s Ladder into Deeprock Gorge. All the others had been present in the Reverend’s church that morning and heard him preach about the coming. Keith had not heard about it until he called on Jennifer Skipworth after the service.

“Oh, now, come on,” he’d said when Jennifer told him what they planned to do. “You can’t be serious!”

“We are serious.” The girl he was in love with stopped pacing her living room and faced him with her hands outstretched. “Keith, we are! Like the Reverend says, it’s all in Revelations if you’ll just take time to read between the lines. Darling, I’m not asking you to believe. Only to come with us.”

“But why Deeprock Gorge?” Keith protested. “I went fishing there once with Mr. Powell”—Otis Powell was editor of the Innsmouth newspaper Keith worked for—“and it’s got to be the most Godforsaken place in the whole of Massachusetts. It’s even hard to get to.”

“Howard has a house there.”

“Oh.” There were some houses in the gorge, Keith remembered. Cabins, anyway. Maybe three or four of them, strung out along the banks of the stream. Weekend summer camps, he guessed they were.

“Howard Lindsay, you mean? The big guy who owns the paint factory?”

She nodded. “He’s a deacon in our church.”

“I see.”

“Do you want to know who else is going?”

“Well, if I’m going to be one of them,” Keith said. Which, of course, he would be, because he sure wasn’t going to let her go on any such crazy mission without him. He had long believed that most of the folks who went to Reverend Beckford’s church were a little daft. That they now believed Satan was about to take over the world didn’t surprise him.

How they hoped to stop old Beelzebub from doing it did interest him, though, as a possible story for the paper. “You mean you’re going there just to pray?”

“That’s right, Keith. To pray.”

“Then why not in the church? Why Deeprock Gorge, of all places?”

“Because Christ wrestled with Satan in a wilderness. Please, darling, try to understand.”

She told him who would be going. Reverend Beckford, of course. Mary Sewell and her eleven-year-old son Davey. Howard Lindsay, who had recently bought the gorge, or at least the cabins in it, so his factory workers could use them weekends. “And, I hope, you. You will come, won’t you, Keith? It’ll only be for one night.”

“Where you go, I go,” he told her.

Jennifer lived with her parents in a house on the edge of town, and on the way back to his in-town bachelor apartment, Keith had stopped at the home of Otis Powell, his editor, and told Powell what was up. “It could be a pretty good story, don’t you think: Reverend Beckford convincing all those good people the Devil is coming to take us over, and some of them going into the wilderness to pray for help?” He would go anyway, he knew, even if Powell laughed at him. But Powell said yes, it could be a story, so go ahead and good luck.

* * *

The Devil’s Ladder behind them, the road along the river’s edge was no more than a pair of ruts through dark grey sand and rocks. At times Keith thought they wouldn’t get through. But there were tyre tracks, so other vehicles must have managed it, and presently, lo and behold, there was the cabin.