Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Do they say what killed the fish?” He could hear the strain in her voice, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the paper. There was a two-page spread on the fish kill, which seemed odd—they were just fish, after all. But there were a number of pictures: the dark corpses piled up like in those World War II newsreels, stretched out on the sand with all their wedge-shaped heads in a row, one old man holding a large fish in his lap as if it were his drowned child. In the background, in the sand, a filigree of dark lettering.

“No... no. Says here it’s a mystery. ‘Local biologists stumped,’ it says. Hey,” he smiled and looked up. “So how many places have their own, local biologist?”

“I... I don’t know,” she said softly. “Do you think we should let him swim?”

“Come again?”

“The baby, should we let him near the water?”

* * *

Eileen had wanted to leave their “filthy” city for years. Actually it was “those filthy people” she’d wanted to leave. Ironic that she insisted they remain at The Shores to have the baby, where the water was so polluted she was afraid to walk closer than fifty feet or so, and even then she held her swollen belly protectively and averted her face. After coming to this decision so reluctantly, she had no intention of going anywhere until it had come to completion. Scott supposed it was some sort of nesting instinct, but he found it completely unexpected from her. He himself didn’t want her to walk there, but he would have been hard-pressed to explain why.

Even though Scott couldn’t work, or couldn’t bring himself to, they still had some savings, and Eileen had inheritance from her parents, so they’d be okay for at least a year or so. Scott couldn’t imagine living much past the baby’s birth. Not that he was sure he was going to die—he just couldn’t imagine living.

The Shores was a lonely place past the tourist season. People they did business with every day—the grocer, the pharmacist, the manager of the beachfront cabin they’d moved to—had grown noticeably less friendly once Scott and Eileen revealed their plans. “Gets pretty cold and windy, especially if you’re not used to it, especially if you’re pregnant,” the pharmacist had said when filling Scott’s prescription of painkillers. “Don’t know that I’d want to put my wife through that.”

“We’re not likely to have everything you’re going to need,” the grocer had added several hours later. “See, I order in limited quantity, because I usually know who my customers are going to be.”

Only the withered and palsied doctor they’d found to guide Eileen through the pregnancy seemed friendly at all, but his garrulousness seemed to have more to do with Eileen’s forthcoming “miracle of birth” than with the patient herself. “The cells, they’re dividing, multiplying even as we speak. Amazing, isn’t it!” He touched her exposed belly with thin fingers that shook and skittered about like a spider’s legs on glass. “Right about now the little one has a webbed-looking hand, no different from what a pig’s foot looks like, about this stage. And imagine, a few weeks back they both had fins.” Scott watched anxiously as the doctor poked and prodded some more, then suddenly thrust his wrinkled ear up to Eileen’s belly. “You can almost hear the little fellow say, ‘I’m no pig, Doctor Linden! At least I don’t think I am!’” He laughed. “Actually, he has no idea what he is right now, and who knows, maybe he’ll fool us all!”

“Well, I hardly think so,” Eileen offered, gently easing herself away from the doctor’s head.

“What I’m saying, dear lady, is that the little one’s body is in flux right now. If you were to observe this new face closely you would see a countenance of barely controlled chaos, fiercely set against the imposed orders of our everyday world. The nose must migrate from somewhere atop the head. The mouth and jaws travel out of the brachial arches. The eyes lie at the sides of his head like his cousin’s, the fish. They creep up front in stealth, as if ashamed to declare their difference. The ears, why, who knows what songs they hear, songs that we...”

“Is she healthy, doctor?” Scott interrupted.

“Well, I can’t say now if it’s a she or a he, but perhaps with the ultrasound...”

“My wife, doctor. Is my wife okay?”

Dr. Linden looked up at Eileen’s face quizzically, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I imagine she is,” he replied.

* * *