Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Is it?” said the man he was talking to. The man’s voice was deep and rich, accented in a way Kapenda always thought of as old-fashioned. It was the voice of the BBC in the 1950s, of the Pathé newsreels. He punctuated everything he said with little coughs, as though he had something caught in his throat.

“Of course,” said Plumb, drawing on all the knowledge he had gained from reading one-and two-minute sound-bite pieces for local and, more latterly, national news. “The world’s heating up, so it rains more. It’s obvious.”

“It’s as simple as that,” said the man, and caught Kapenda’s eye over Plumb’s shoulder. One of his eyes was milky and blind, Kapenda saw, and then the man, disconcertingly, winked his dead eye and smiled.

“He really is an insufferable fool, isn’t he?” the man said later to Kapenda, nodding at Plumb, who was now holding court in the middle of a group of other talents. What’s the collective noun for the talent? thought Kapenda. A show-off? A blandness? A stupidity? He moved a forefinger through a puddle of spilled beer on the table, swirling it out to make a circle. The man, whose name was David, dipped his own fingers in the puddle and made an intricate pattern on the wood with the liquid before wiping it away.

“He thinks he understands it,” said David, and gave one of his little coughs. “But he doesn’t.”

“What is there to understand?” asked Needham. “It’s rain. It comes down, it floods, we film it and he talks about it and tries to look dramatic and knowledgeable whilst wearing an anorak that the viewers can see and wellingtons that they can’t.”

“This,” said David, waving a hand at the windows and the rain beyond. He was drunk; Needham was drunker. “It’s not so simple as he wants to believe. There are forces at work more complex than mere global warming.” He coughed again, a polite rumble.

“Pollution?” said Needham. Kapenda thought of his camera, of the eye he held to his shoulder to see the world, about how he’d frame this discussion. One at each edge of the screen, he decided, in tight close-up, David’s opaque eye peering into the lens as Needham’s head bobbed back and forth, up and down, like a bird. Needham was a good producer and director because he stressed over the little details, but a bad drinking companion because he got like a terrier over tiny fragments of information.

“Pollution? Possibly, but no answer about the Earth is that simple. Why is the water rising so fast? So far? Mere geography, or something more? My point is that we look to the wrong places for answers, because the real answers have faces too terrible to contemplate,” said David and then stood. He was tall and solid, not fat exactly but well built, his waistcoat straining under the pressure from his ample belly.

“You’re looking in the wrong place, all of you.” And with that, nodding his thanks for the company, David turned and walked away. Kapenda grinned at the look of confusion on Needham’s face, saw that Plumb was heading back their way and quickly rose himself.

“I need a walk,” he said.

“A swim, surely?” said Needham, and he and Plumb laughed. Kapenda did not reply.

The pub was on a hill—it was why it remained mostly unaffected by the storms and the rising floodwater. The rain was coming in near-horizontal sweeps now, gusting along in cold breaths that made Kapenda shiver. Lightning crackled somewhere over the fields, followed by thunder that reminded him of David’s voice and cough. The forecasters were saying that this storm would burn itself out in the next day or so, but they’d said that before and been wrong. The previous week, the rains had continued through the period they’d confidently predicted would be dry, and the groundwater rose and rose. What had he come outside for? Not air, not even to be away from Needham and Plumb, not really.

Kapenda went down towards the lights that were strung out along Grovehill’s main street. Generators, housed in the nearby community hall, powered the lamps and rope barriers prevented him from getting to the water. Even at this time of night, news crews were clustered along the ropes, each filming or preparing for filming. He tried to look at the scene as though he was holding his camera—was there something here not about the floods but about the press response to it? No, that had been done.

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he’d seen since this all started? He’d been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.