Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Grant gave in to an incredulous laugh that politeness required him to muffle. Perhaps another cottage might be more welcoming, he thought with dwindling conviction as he progressed along the seafront. He could hardly see through any of the windows, and such furniture as he could distinguish, by no means in every room, looked encrusted with more than dimness. The few shops might have belonged to fishmongers; one window displayed a dusty plastic lobster on a marble slab also bearing stains suggestive of the prints of large wet hands. The last shop must have been more general, given the debris scattered about the bare floor—distorted but unopened tins, a disordered newspaper whose single legible headline said fish stocks drop, and was there a dead cat in the darkest corner? Beyond two further cottages was the refuge of the phone box.

Perhaps refuge was too strong a word. Slime on the floor must indicate that it hadn’t been out of reach of the last high tide. A fishy smell that had accompanied him along the seafront was also present, presumably borne by the wind that kept lancing the trapped heat with chill. Vandalism appeared to have invaded even this little community; the phone directory was strewn across the metal shelf below the coin-box in fragments so sodden they looked chewed. Grant had to adjust the rakish handset on its hook to obtain a tone before he dragged the indisposed dial to the numbers he’d repeated all the way to the box. He was trying to distinguish whether he was hearing static or simply the waves when a man’s brusque practically Scottish voice said “Beach.”

“You aren’t a garage, then.”

“Who says I’m not? Beach’s Garage.”

“I’m with you now,” Grant said, though feeling much as he had when Tom translated his wife’s mnemonic. “And you fix cars.”

“I’d be on the scrapheap if I didn’t.”

“Good,” Grant blurted, and to compensate “I mean, I’ve got one for you.”

“Lucky me.”

“It’s a Cavalier that wouldn’t go uphill.”

“Can’t say a word about it till I’ve seen it. All I want to know is where you are.”

“Twenty miles south of you, they tell me.”

“I don’t need to ask who.” After a pause during which Grant felt sought by the chill and the piscine smell, the repairman said “I can’t be there before dark.”

“You think I should take a room.”

“I don’t tell anybody what to do. Invited you in as well, did they?”

The man’s thriftiness with language was affecting Grant much as unresponsive pupils did. “Shouldn’t they have?” he retorted.

“They’ll do their best for you, Tom and Fiona. They need the cash.”

“How did you know who they were?”

“There’s always some that won’t be driven out of their homes. A couple, anyway.”

“Driven.”

When competing at brevity brought no answer, Grant was about to add to his words when the man said “You won’t see many fish round Baiting any more.”

Grant heard the basis of a geography lesson in this. “So they’ve had to adapt to living off tourists.”

“And travellers and whatever else they catch.” The repairman interrupted himself with a cough that might have been a mirthless laugh. “Anyway, that’s their business. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

The phone commenced droning like a fly attracted by the fishy smell until Grant stubbed his thumb on the hook. He dug the crumpled number of the holiday cottage out of his jeans and dialled, rousing only a bell that repeated itself as insistently as the waves for surely longer than his fellow students could have disagreed over who should answer it, even if they sustained the argument with a drink and quite possibly a toke to boot. No doubt they were expecting him to arrive ahead of them and set about organising as usual. He dropped the receiver onto its prongs and forced open the arthritic door.

He might have returned to his car along the sea wall, the top of which was nearly two feet wide, if waves hadn’t been spilling over much of its length. There appeared to be little else to describe to any class he would teach; rubble was piled so high in the occasional alleys between the cottages that he couldn’t even see behind them. The bay within the wall swarmed with infant waves, obscuring his view of whatever he kept glimpsing beneath them: probably the tops of pillars reinforcing the wall, except that the objects were irregularly spaced—the tips of a natural rock formation the wall had followed, then, although the string of blurred shapes put him in mind of a series of reflections of the moon. He was no closer to identifying them by the time he reached the Cavalier.

He manhandled his suitcase through the gap the creaky boot vouchsafed him and tramped across the road. He was hesitating over reaching for the knocker when the cottage door sprang open. He was bracing himself to be confronted by the husband, which must be why the sight of the woman’s upturned face was disconcerting. “Get in, then,” she exhorted with what could have been intended as rough humour.