Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

While the battered cardboard box she opened on the table was labelled LUDO, that wasn’t quite what it contained. Rattling about on top of the familiar board inside the box were several fragments of a substance Grant told himself wasn’t bone. “We make our own amusement round here,” Fiona said. “We use whatever’s sent us.”

“He’s not your lad.”

“He could be.”

The scrape of Grant’s chair on the stone floor went some way towards expressing his discomfort. “I’ll phone now,” he said.

“Not driving, are you?” Tom enquired.

“Not at all.” Grant couldn’t be bothered resenting whatever the question implied. “I’m going to enjoy the walk.”

“He’ll be back soon for you to play with,” Tom told his wife.

She turned to gaze out at the dark while Tom’s stare weighed on their visitor, who stood up. “I won’t need a key, will I?”

“We’ll be waiting for you,” Fiona mumbled.

Grant sensed tension as oppressive as a storm, and didn’t thank the bare floorboards for amplifying his retreat along the hall. He seized the clammy latch and hauled the front door open. The night was almost stagnant. Subdued waves smoothed themselves out on the black water beyond the sea wall, inside which the bay chattered silently with whiteness beneath the incomplete mask of a moon a few days short of full. An odour he no longer thought it adequate to call fishy lingered in the humid air or inside him as he hurried towards the phone box.

The heat left over from the day more than kept pace with him. The infrequent jab of chill wind simply encouraged the smell. He wondered if an allergy to whatever he’d eaten was beginning to make itself felt in a recurrent sensation, expanding through him from his stomach, that his flesh was turning to rubber. The cottages had grown intensely present as chunks of moon fallen to earth, and seemed less deserted than he’d taken them to be: the moonlight showed that patches of some of the windows had been rubbed or breathed or even licked imperfectly clear. Once he thought faces rose like flotsam to watch him from the depths of three successive cottages, unless the same face was following him from house to ruined house. When he failed to restrain himself from looking, of course there was only moonlit dimness, and no dead cat in the general store. He did his best to scoff at himself as he reached the phone box.

Inside, the smell was lying in wait for him. He held the door open with his foot, though that admitted not only the infrequent wind but also more of the light that made his hand appear as pale as the receiver in it was black. His clumsy swollen fingers found the number in his pocket and held the scrap of paper against the inside of a frame that had once contained a mirror above the phone. Having managed to dial, he returned the paper to its niche against his unreasonably flabby thigh and clutched the receiver to his face with both hands. The fourth twosome of rings was parted by a clatter that let sounds of revelry at him, and belatedly a voice. “Who’s this?”

For longer than a breath Grant felt as if he was being forced to stand up in class for a question he couldn’t answer, and had to turn it back on the questioner. “It’s Ian, isn’t it?”

“Bill,” Ian said, and shouted it to their friends. “Where have you got to?” he eventually thought to ask.

“I’ve broken down on the coast. I’m getting the car fixed tomorrow.”

“When are we seeing you?”

“I told you, tomorrow,” Grant said, though the notion felt remote in more ways than he could name.

“Have a drink for us, then, and we will for you. Won’t we, you crew?”

The enthusiasm this aroused fell short of Grant, not least because he’d been reminded of the water accompanying dinner, a memory that revived the taste of the meal. “Don’t get too pissed to drive tomorrow,” Ian advised and made way for a chorus of drunken encouragement followed by the hungry buzz of the receiver.

Grant planted the receiver on its hook and shoved himself out of the box. Even if Baiting had boasted a pub, he would have made straight for his room; just now, supine was the only position that appealed to him. As the phone box shut with a muted thud that emphasised the desertion of the seafront, he set out along the top of the submerged wall.