Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

They always walked back from the doctor’s office through the small street of shops, because Eileen insisted that some exercise was good for her pregnancy. Scott was doubtful; she looked pale, especially against this backdrop of dark, burnt-looking wooden structures, but she would not be dissuaded. Nor would she pause by any structure for a breather. Now and then they would see someone—usually a fisherman in his rubber slicker—but this was increasingly rare. There were no CLOSED or OPEN signs in any of the doors, although Scott sometimes could detect yellowish light in the distant recesses of a shop or two. He supposed the locals just knew, and strangers had to find out.

By mid-afternoon each day an artificial twilight had set in, due to cloud cover rolling in from the bay. He hurried her along as fast as he thought safe. Once the clouds came in, everything smelled like rotting fish.

Around her sixth month of pregnancy, they started finding the eggs. “Eggs” was what Eileen called them, and that was what she’d convinced herself they were, but Scott had serious doubts. They seemed too large, and too deliberate. “Someone makes these things, honey, or several someones do. Look, that one has a signature on it.” He tugged on the object, jarring it loose from the sandy stretch in front of their cabin where they’d discovered it the previous day. It was heavier than it looked, another detail convincing him they were either carved or manufactured, perhaps part of some local festival. No doubt the locals worked on these things all year, in their garages and basements, bringing them out at a preordained time of the year, planting them like the objects of a giant’s Easter egg hunt. He’d ask the manager of the cabins for confirmation, if he could ever find the fellow—they hadn’t seen him in weeks.

The egg-shaped object had an odd centre of gravity. It shifted under his hands and he had to struggle to control it. Dangerously off-balance, he bumped into Eileen, almost knocking her down. “God, I’m sorry.” He wheezed, and ridiculously felt on the verge of tears. “There, see? A signature.” He played his fingers over the back of the egg where a line of squiggles had been pressed into its surface.

“Are you sure that’s a signature, hon? It’s pretty hard to read.”

“You saw Dr. Linden’s handwriting on your prescription didn’t you? No better than this. In fact it looks damned similar, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one he made.”

“If you’re right about the local celebration.”

“Well, celebration or not, someone is making these things. Now look at that one over there.” He led her over to a bend in the gravel and shell road that wound through the spare trees behind the cabins. “Look at all that decorative filigree. You can’t tell me that’s random chance at work. Besides this one’s a little bigger, and shaped a bit differently.” He bent and placed her hand on the pattern. She jerked back as if shocked.

“It feels weird,” she said, looking around nervously. “I see a few more over by those trees. I wonder how many of these things there are, anyway.”

“Just a few, I think. I mean, how many locals can there be? Full-time residents of The Shores? Not more than three dozen, I would think.”

* * *

But the number of “eggs” they found around the cabin and especially on their daily walks down the beach doubled, doubled again, and doubled again. Eileen stopped mentioning them, and after awhile even stopped looking at them as far as Scott could tell.

Scott could look at little else. The round tops of the eggs made a knobbed carpet from the back of the beach up the grassy slope to the rocks beyond, and he could see a scattering wedged precariously on the high cliffs above. Sometimes they had to veer out of the way of some glacier-like encroachment of eggs onto the beach, stepping into the mossy edges of the water more than once. He did so with trepidation; Eileen simply marched on with no change in expression.

Eileen was changing: her breasts swelling, her belly dropping lower, hips and pelvis spreading. Now and then he could see blotches, broken blood vessels in her face. She looked into the mirror with distaste; often she didn’t look into the mirror at all. She was gorgeous. But if he looked only at her belly: the high, tight roundness of it all, he could think only of the eggs filling the landscape around them, and he had to look away as well.

Eileen had gone from asking him about his own health, his own pains and sensations, his own feelings from several times a day to once, to every week or two, to not at all. He thought it just as well. There was painful activity going on inside which his pills only vaguely and intermittently assuaged.