Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

She drops the sponge to the floor at her feet (she doesn’t have to look to know her toes have begun to fuse one to the next), and gazes into her pitchy eyes until she’s sure the adjustments to her genitals are finished. When she does look down at herself, there’s a taut, flat place in place of the low mound of the mons pubis, and the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris—all the intricacies of her sex—have been reduced to the vertical slit of an oviduct where her vagina was moments before. On either side of the slit are tiny, triangular pelvic fins, no more than an inch high and three inches long.

“We should hurry now, Betsy,” Michael says. He’s right, of course. She has to reach the bathtub full of warm salty water while she can still walk. Once or twice before she’s waited too long, and he’s had to carry her, and that humiliation was almost worse than all the rest combined. In the tub, she curls almost foetal, and the flaps in front of Elizabeth’s gills open and close, pumping in and out again, extracting all the oxygen she’ll need until sunrise. Michael will stay with her, guarding her, as he always does.

She can sleep without lids to shield her black eyes, and, when she sleeps, she dreams of the river flowing down to the ruined seaport, to Essex Bay, and then out into the Atlantic due south of Plum Island. She dreams of the craggy spine of Devil Reef rising a few feet above the waves and of those who crawl out

onto the reef most nights to bask beneath the moon. Those like her. And, worst of all, she dreams of the abyss beyond the reef, and towers and halls of the city there, a city that has stood for eighty thousand years and will stand for eighty thousand more. On these nights, changed and slumbering, Elizabeth Haskings can’t lie to herself and pretend that her mother fled to Oregon, or even that her grandfather lies in his grave in Highland Cemetery. On these nights, she isn’t afraid of anything.

THE CHAIN

by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

THE FIRST DAYS were pleasant. Fun, even. Different from normal life. A break. A change—exactly what David needed, and what he’d come there for.

He slept well and rose early, carrying his first herbal tea of the day down to the beach. He took long walks and ate healthy meals, and sometimes when he felt like a cigarette he elected to not have one. He avoided alcohol. He thought about what he might paint, and in the evening sat on the small deck in front of the cottage and read non-taxing fiction or sat gazing calmly into space, nodding affably at people who walked by, as if he really lived here.

Everything flowed. One day led comfortably into the next.

It took a week before the chain began to break.

* * *

On Monday he’d arrived by car down from San Francisco and moved into the cottage. This didn’t take long. The tiny house was thoughtfully set up for vacation rentals, and provided everything he could possibly need except something to wear and something to do, both of which he’d brought with him in the back seat of his convertible Mini Cooper. Once a source of pride, the car was now battered and prone to malfunction (much like, David occasionally felt, himself).

He put his regular clothes in the drawers in the bedroom. He put his painting clothes in the small garage, along with easel, paints and a stack of canvases. He’d brought ten, a statement of intent. All were three feet square, purely because his supplier in the city happened to have them on sale. Tackling a fixed aspect ratio might be invigorating, and having no choice might also help focus the mind. So he hoped.

The garage had no windows except for a thin frosted strip along the top of the door, but the owner evidently used the space as an occasional workshop and it was artificially well lit via bulbs and fluorescent tubes. It seemed a shame, having driven five hours to such a beautiful part of the coast, to be planning to spend large portions of every day hidden from it—but that was the purpose of being here. To paint. To kick himself back into enjoying his vocation, even caring about it again.

If he really got his groove on, ten canvases wouldn’t be nearly enough for three weeks’ work—his process was to rough out initial masses quickly, returning at leisure to detail and finesse—but should additional ones be needed then he was confident he’d be able to obtain them. Carmel has a bewildering number of art galleries, and is home to people who fill them. They weren’t David’s kind of painter, but that was okay. David wasn’t sure if he was his kind of painter any more either—or any kind of painter at all.

That was what he was here to find out.

* * *