Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Just outside the window stood a naked man holding what looked like a tree-limb. He was about to use the limb as a club to smash the window, it seemed; at any rate he was holding it aloft in both hands and looking at the window. But what he was was more terrible than anything he might be thinking of doing.

He was big. Big all over. And not just huge but lumpy, as if he was made of rubber and someone had blown too much air into him. As for his head, Keith stared at that in total disbelief.

It wasn’t natural in any way. It was, in fact, a mass of enormous lumps or bumps that all but hid the eyes and most of the mouth. Massive, malformed swellings they were, from which the man’s eyes blazed like twin red coals and the left side of his mouth—all that remained visible—was curled up over teeth that were like the fangs of a serpent.

As Keith stared at him, half-paralysed, the man took a step forward and voiced the sound that must have waked Keith in the first place: a long, loud snarl of rage or hate or fury that actually made the window rattle.

And he wasn’t alone.

Coming up behind him, on his right, was a naked woman, and she too brandished a tree-limb club. She might have been a pretty woman once, but now she had the same lumps all over her body that the man had, and something even uglier. Big tufts of hair grew out of her cheeks and breasts and belly: long, black, bristly hair that made her look like some kind of wild animal. Or something that was in the process of becoming an animal but hadn’t quite finished. She too was snarling or hissing or whatever the sound ought to be called... because it wasn’t just one sound now, or coming from only those two throats. At least half a dozen other things that had been men and women came plodding into view even as Keith stood there petrified at the window. All of them had clubs.

“Lord Jesus,” Keith whispered again, then spun himself around on one heel and let out a yell that seemed likely to tear the roof off the cabin. “Reverend!” he screamed. “Lindsay! Wake up, wake up! We’re in big trouble!”

Even before the Reverend and Howard Lindsay reached his side to see what he meant, the thing outside nearest the window swung his tree-branch club and the window exploded.

The Reverend took one look at what was out there and began to pray in a low, shuddery voice. Howard Lindsay said, “Great God a’mighty!” and rushed to the door, calling back over his shoulder, “I’ll get the others! We have to clear out of here!” When he came racing back he had a double-barrelled shotgun in his hands, and the women and young Davey were behind him. Big Mary looked ridiculous in a lace-trimmed pink nightgown, of all things, while Jennifer and Davey wore pyjamas.

All three were big-eyed with fright and had a right to be, because the things outside were all at the window now, or their hideous faces were, filling the room with their snarling and hissing, and the floor was littered with shards of glass, and the Reverend was still praying, and Keith Walker stood there helpless, not knowing what to do. Nothing Keith had learned as a newspaper reporter was any good to him now.

Howard Lindsay knew what to do, though. Maybe he was the type for this kind of thing—big, burly, and running a paint factory—or maybe having a weapon in his hands gave him confidence. As if he faced a crowd of angry, naked, no-longer-human people every night of his life, he thrust the gun out in front of him and charged the shattered window yelling, “Get out of here! Out!”

Whatever they were, they still had minds enough to know the gun was sure to kill some of them if he used it. As he rushed to the window they backed away from it, still making those unhuman noises. But they backed away only a little.

“Out!” Lindsay roared, thrusting the gun through the broken pane and waving it around so as to threaten all of them with it. “Get away from here or I’ll use this on you!” And when they didn’t retreat fast enough to please him, he aimed over their heads and fired off a blast.

They backed up a bit more, and when Lindsay saw that was all the retreating they were going to do, he swung himself around and yelled at those in the room with him. “Come on!” he bellowed. “We have to get out of here while they’re deciding what to do!”

Waving the gun, he led a rush to the bedroom doorway and through the big front room to the veranda, and down the veranda steps to Reverend Beckford’s station wagon.

They piled into the wagon, all of them—the men and Jennifer and young Davey still in their pyjamas, Big Mary in that ridiculous nightgown, and with Lindsay at the wheel, because the Reverend was still praying, they took off. And just in time, too, because even as they did, that crowd of naked, hideous, no-longer-human men and women came around the corner of the cabin in clumsy pursuit.