Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

Perhaps she was eager to shut out the wind that was trying all the inner doors, unless she wanted to exclude the smell. More of that lingered once Grant slammed the door than he found inviting. “Let’s have you up,” the woman said.

She’d hardly set one shabbily slippered foot on the lowest of the narrow uncarpeted stairs that bisected the hall when she swung round to eye him. “First time away?”

“Nothing like.”

“Just your case looks so new.”

“My parents bought me a set of them when I started college.”

“We never had any children. What’s your name, anyway?” she added with a fierceness he hoped she was directing at herself. “You know ours.”

“Bill Grant.”

“Good and strong,” she said, giving him a slow appreciative blink before stumping shapelessly upwards to thump the first door open with her buttocks. The rumpled sea widened beyond the small window as he followed her into the room. He’d passed a number of framed photographs on his way upstairs, and here above the sink was yet another grey image of a man, nondescript except for the fish he was measuring between his hands. As in the other pictures, he was her husband Tom. His presence helped the furniture—a barely even single bed, a barren dressing-table, a wardrobe no larger than a phone box—make the room feel yet more confined. “Anything like home?” Fiona said.

It did remind him somewhat of his bedroom when he was half his size. “Something,” he admitted.

“You want to feel at home if you go anywhere. I know I would.” Having stared at him as though to ensure some of her meaning remained, she reached up to grab his shoulders with her cold swollen hands as an aid to squeezing past him. “We’ll call you when it’s time to put our snouts in the trough,” she said.

He listened to the series of receding creaks her descent extracted from the stairs, and then he relieved his suitcase of the items he would need for an overnight stay, feeling absurdly as if he was preparing for a swift escape. Once he’d ventured across the tiny strident landing to the bathroom, a tiled white cell occupied by three dripping sweaters pegged on a rope above the bath and by a chilly damp that clung to him, he sat next to his pyjamas on the bed to scribble notes for a geography lesson based on Baiting, then sidled between the sink and the foot of the bed to the window.

It seemed his powers of observation needed work. The whitish rounded underwater blobs were closer together and to the middle of the sea wall than he remembered, unless any of them had indeed been a version of the moon, which was presently invisible above the roof. Perhaps he would soon be able to identify them, since the waves were progressing towards relative calm. He left his bulky bunch of keys on the windowsill before lying down to listen to the insistent susurration, which was occasionally interrupted by a plop that led him to believe the sea was less uninhabited than the repairman had said. He grew tired of craning to catch sight of whatever kept leaving ripples inside the sea wall, and by the time Fiona called “Ready” up the stairs, an invitation reminiscent of the beginning of a game, he was shelving towards sleep.

He must be near to dreaming while awake, since he imagined that a face had edged out of hiding to watch him sit up. It might have been dour Tom’s in the photograph, or the moon that had crept into view above the bay, possibly appending at least one blob to the cluster along the sea wall. “I’ll be down,” Grant shouted loud enough, he hoped, to finish wakening himself.

He wasn’t expecting to eat in the kitchen, on a table whose unfolding scarcely left room for three hard straight chairs and a stained black range crowned with bubbling saucepans and, beneath a small window that grudgingly twilighted the room, a massive stone sink. He’d thought a fishy smell that had kept him company upstairs was carried by the wind, but now he realised it might also have been seeping up from the kitchen. He was exerting himself to look entertained when Tom frowned across the table at him. “She ought to have asked you to pay in advance.”

“Oh, Tom, he’s nothing but a youngster.”

Grant was a little too much of one to appreciate being described that way. “Can I give you a cheque and a card?”

“And your name and address.”

“Let’s have you sitting down first,” Fiona cried, stirring a pan that aggravated the smell.

Grant fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for the cheque book and card wallet. “How much am I going to owe you?”

Tom glowered at his soup-bowl as though ashamed to ask. “Thirty if you’re here for breakfast.”

“Of course he will be, Tom.”

“If he isn’t sick of it by then.”

Grant wrote a cheque in his best blackboard handwriting and slid it with his guarantee card and driving licence across the table. “Grant’s the word, eh?” Tom grumbled, poking at the cards with a thick flabby forefinger whose nail was bitten raw. “She said you were a student, right enough.”

“I teach as well,” Grant was provoked into retorting. “That’ll be my life.”