Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

When it began raining he tried to walk a little faster, but a road to walk on became increasingly rare. Egg pushed against egg until all repositioned and spread from horizon to horizon until half the visible world had been filled in. Lightning flashes showed off the innate lustre of the shells, as increasing downpour made the curves change, lengthen and soften. He stepped up on their backs gingerly at first, going from egg to egg as if crossing a stream on oily round stones.

Then he heard Eileen’s voice calling through the slam of rain and he stepped hard and smashed and pushed forward with shoes caught in the breaking shells. He fell again and again with hands in goo and fierce activity snapping at his fingers but no matter because Eileen was screaming now against the crash of the shores and sky.

Pain ripped through his belly so completely infiltrated now he could not distinguish between stomach and pain, pain and colon and oesophagus in a confusion of cells. Around him seethed an ocean of the newborn, sliding easily through shell wall, eye and claw-foot and tentacle, and all of them different, all of them distinguishable, a thousand faces of the thousand forms.

“Scott!” She screamed and he saw her rise up in tatters, their child but one more child who would never know or understand or care who its parents had been.

But still he ran and smashed and bled to hold these tatters of her in awe. He closed his eyes in a last pathetic attempt to shut out the truth as around him the chaos that was the true face of the world turned and ate of itself again and again, the new bearing but brief witness to the old as their flesh grows thin, thinner still, and dissolves.

FROM CABINET 34, DRAWER 6

by

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

5:46 P.M.

THE OLD THEATRE on Asylum Street smells like stale popcorn and the spilled soft drinks that have soured on the sticky floors, and the woman sitting in the very back row, the woman with the cardboard box open in her lap, shuts her eyes. A precious few seconds free of the ridiculous things on the screen, just the theatre stink and the movie sounds—a scream and a splash, a gunshot—and then the man coughs again. Thin man in his navy-blue fedora and his threadbare gabardine jacket, the man with the name that sounds like an ice-cream flavour, and when she opens her eyes he’s still sitting there in the row in front of her, looking at her expectantly over the back of his seat. The screen becomes a vast rectangular halo about his head, a hundred thousand shades of grey, and “Well,” he says, “there you have it.”

“I don’t know what I’m seeing any more,” she says and he nods his head very slowly, up and down, up and down, like a small, pale thing on the sea, and she looks up at the screen again.

The man in the rubber monster suit, the flicker, the soft, insectile flutter from the projector in the booth above her head.

“Just an old movie,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says knowingly, not bothering to whisper because there’s no one else is in the theatre but the two of them, him and her, the skinny, antique man and the bookish woman with her cardboard box. “A silly old movie to scare children at Saturday afternoon matinees, to scare teenage girls—”

“Is that what it is? Is that the truth?”

“The truth,” he says, smiles a tired sort of a smile and coughs again. A handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his thin lips clean, and then the man with the ice-cream name stares for a moment into his own spit and phlegm caught in folds of linen as though they were tea leaves and he could read the future there.

“Yes, I suppose that’s what you would call it,” he tells her, stuffing the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “You would call it that until something better comes along.”

On screen, a cavern beneath the black Amazonian lake, glycerine mist and rifle smoke, and the creature’s gills rise and fall, struggling for breath; its bulging eyes are as blank and empty as the glass eyes of a taxidermied fish.

“It’s almost over,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “Are you staying for the end?”

“I might talk,” the woman whispers, even though they are alone, and the creature roars, its plated, scaly flesh torn by bullets, by knives and spears; rivulets of dark blood leak from its latex hide, and the old man nods his head again.

“You might. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Would someone try to stop me?”

“Someone already has, Miss Morrow.”

And now it’s her turn to nod, and she looks away from the movie screen, the man in the latex suit’s big death scene up there, the creature drifting limp and lifeless to the bottom of its lonely, weedy lagoon. Lacey Morrow looks down at the box in her lap, and If I’d never found the goddamned thing, she thinks, if someone else had found it instead of me. All the things she would give away for that to be true, years or memories, her life if she could die without knowing the things she knows now.