Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

His surroundings grew derisively irrelevant: the hills quilted with fields, the mountains ridged with pines, the roundish moon trying out its whiteness in the otherwise blue sky. He managed to execute most of a turn as the car slithered backwards, and sent it downhill past a Range Rover loaded with a family whose children turned to display their tongues to him. The July heat buttered him as he swung the Cavalier onto a parched verge, where the engine hacked to itself while he glared at the map.

Half the page containing his location was crowded with the fingerprints of mountains. Only the coast was unhampered by their contours. He eased the car off the brown turf and nursed it several digressive miles to the coast road, where a signpost pointed left to Windhill, right to Baiting. Northward had looked as though it might bring him sooner inland to the motorway, and so he took the Baiting route.

He hadn’t bargained for the hindrance of the wind. Along the jagged coastline all the trees leaned away from the jumpy sea as though desperate to grasp the land. Before long the barren seaward fields gave way to rocks and stony beaches, and there weren’t even hedges to fend off the northwester. Whenever the gusts took a breath he smelled how overworked the engine was growing. Beside the road was evidence of the damage the wind could wreak: scattered planks of some construction which, to judge by a ruin a mile further on, had been a fishmonger’s stall. Then the doggedly spiky hedge to his right winced inland, revealing an arc of cottages as white as the moon would be when the sky went out. Perhaps someone in the village could repair the car, or Grant would find a room for the night—preferably both.

The ends of the half-mile arc of cottages were joined across the inlet by a submerged wall or a path that divided the prancing sea from the less restless bay. The far end was marked by a lone block of colour, a red telephone box planted in the water by a trick of perspective. His glimpse of a glistening object crouched or heaped in front of it had to be another misperception; when he returned his attention to the view once he’d finished tussling with the wheel as a gust tried to shove the car across the road, he saw no sign of life.

The car was panting and shivering by the time he reached the first cottage. A vicious wind that smelled of fish stung his skin as he eased his rusty door shut and peered tearfully at the buildings opposite. He thought all the windows were curtained with net until he realised the whiteness was salt, which had also scoured the front doors pale. In the very first window a handwritten sign offered room. The wind hustled him across the road, which was strewn with various conditions of seaweed, to the fish-faced knocker on a door that had once been black.

More of the salt that gritted under his fingers was lodged in the hinge. He had to dig his thumb into the gaping mouth to heave the fish-head high and slam it against the metal plate. He heard the blow fall flat in not much of a passage and a woman’s voice demanding shrilly “Who wants us now?”

The nearest to a response was an irregular series of slow footsteps that ended behind the door, which was dragged wide by a man who filled most of the opening. Grant couldn’t tell how much of his volume he owed to his cable-knit jersey and loose trousers, but the bulk of his face drooped like perished rubber from his cheekbones. Salt might account for the redness of his small eyes, though perhaps anxiety had turned his sparse hair and dense eyebrows white. He hugged himself and shivered and glanced past his visitor, presumably at the wind. Parting his thick lips with a tongue as ashen, he mumbled “Where have you come from?”

“Liverpool.”

“Don’t know it,” the man said, and seemed ready to use that as an excuse to close the door.

A woman plodded out of the kitchen at the end of the cramped dingy hall. She looked as though marriage had transformed her into a version of the man, shorter but broader to compensate and with hair at least as white, not to mention clothes uncomfortably similar to his. “Bring him in,” she urged.

“What are you looking for?” her husband muttered.

“Someone who can fix my car and a room if I’ll need one.”

“Twenty miles up the coast.”

“I don’t think it’ll last that far. Won’t they come here?”

“Of course they will if they’re wanted, Tom. Let him in.”

“You’re staying, then.”

“I expect I may have to. Can I phone first?”

“If you’ve the money you can give it a tackle.”

“How much will it take?” When Tom’s sole answer was a stare, Grant tried “How much do you want?”

“Me, nothing. Nor her either. Phone’s up the road.”

Grant was turning away, not without relief, when the woman said “Won’t he need the number? Tommy and his Fiona.”

“I know that. Did you get it?” Tom challenged Grant.

“I don’t think—”

“Better start, then. Five. Three. Three. Five,” Tom said and shut the door.