Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Scott, I’ve stood by you. You can’t say I haven’t.”

“And I’m grateful. I think children would be good for the both of us. They’ll make us look forward.”

“My god... Scott...”

“They’ll make us look at things more positively. We’re woefully short on positive outlook around here.”

“My god, Scott. You have cancer. You want me to have kids, and then raise them by myself?”

He stared at her. She’d just told him he was going to die. Well, everyone was going to die, why was he being such a kid about it? She’d never acknowledged it before, not even when he himself had spoken it out loud. But she didn’t know. Nobody knew. “No,” he replied. “No” to every notion passing through her head. Then he’d left the room, and their marriage. It had been an unreasonable response on his part, but chaos had passed into his body, and he did not believe it would ever leave.

Infiltration, carcinoma... The men and women in their white coats had used the words so elegantly, as if reciting deeply felt poetry, or intoning prayers in some rare dialect before a congregation anxious for enlightenment. Metastatic, diffusely spreading, degree of penetration, invasion. Surgical resection with regional lymphadenectomy was the treatment of choice for stage two gastric cancer. He decided to forego the clinical trials, pretending to family and friends a cure had taken place.

And maybe it had. Who could know? Strangeness ran through his body, and in madness his body had begun to eat itself, but who could say that the strangeness would always be alien to him?

* * *

They continued to live together. She travelled with him to doctors, shopping, the occasional movie. She was loyal to the end, and it pained him that that wasn’t enough. He’d left her in his head, and could not find his way back. And he wasn’t even sure she knew.

Then this vacation together. She thought it would do him some good. She didn’t say it would do “us” some good because he knew she wasn’t really looking forward to spending time out in public with her dying husband. She was a good person; she was genuinely concerned about his welfare. She should get away before he poisoned her.

There’d been no warning. Symptoms had been insignificant. Sometimes a slight pain when he ate a little too much, but who hadn’t felt that at one time or other? Now and then a little difficulty swallowing, but he’d always been too emotional, always on the verge of having that lump in his throat. Later on he thought he had an ulcer— he didn’t relax enough. But who could relax, the way the world was?

And the way the world was, was indifferent.

He’d never brought up having children again. He knew it was the selfish urge of someone who was dying. No good for her, or for any potential children for that matter. What would he do with children anyway? What would they do?

They would watch him die. That, he realised, was what he wanted. The young bear witness to the passing of the old. That was the way it happened the world over.

And beyond that, there was this flesh of his that would continue to walk the careless and uncaring world. Egocentric reasoning, perhaps. After he’d been diagnosed, an elderly neighbour had dropped by to discuss his own terminal illness. He wanted Scott to know that things never really ended, that they simply changed into something else. “There is a reality beyond the everyday,” the man had said. “We are all part of something larger. We are each one face of that which has many faces. What we see today, in this life, is only part of the story, no more than an illusion of the truth.” Instead of being reassured, however, Scott had been terrified. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of my flesh, a voice had intoned in his evening’s dream. Scott had never sought to be a part of anything.

The fear was a bad reason to have kids, but he couldn’t quite let it go.

* * *

A child wasn’t going to happen, but he could still imagine it—how it would look, the sound of its voice. There would be a strangeness about it, surely, but in this child the strangeness would be beautiful. In this child the strangeness would not be a frightening thing.

There had been no reason for him to get sick, no reason at all. He had done nothing wrong. He had exercised, he had watched what he ate. He’d been so careful with everything put into his mouth Eileen often said he appeared to be taking the sacrament. You just never could tell what they put into food these days. Some of it was never even meant to be food. Not for normal people. Now Eileen cooked with soy and they ate as much fish as possible, but he never could feel comfortable eating fish, wondering from what depths they came.

Every night at the Shores he would look out over the ocean, gaze down where the water lapped and drifted back, half-expecting some child to emerge from the waves after its long swim home.

“Beautiful... beautiful,” he would say.