Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

That was old. Every television station had those shots. He’d been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man’s civilised veneer was when set against nature’s uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dalí might have painted—a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

What about the figures in the field?

Actually, the fields were a good starting point. They had flooded heavily and most were under at least four or five feet of water, but due to some quirk of meteorology or geography the water on them was sitting calm. Somewhere, he thought, somewhere there’s an image in that smooth expanse that I can use.

* * *

Kapenda waited until morning, and such light as came with sunrise, before investigating. He left a note for Needham, who likely wouldn’t be up until mid-morning anyway, and drove back along the roads towards the field. Through the windscreen, the road ahead of him moved like a snake, constantly surging and writhing.

The dark shape was in the first field he came to, drifting slowly along, spinning. Kapenda saw it through the tangle of hedgerow and stopped, climbing out into knee-high water and lifting his camera to his shoulder. He couldn’t see well, was too low, so climbed onto the vehicle’s door-sill and then higher, onto its roof. Was this the field where he had seen the figures? He thought it was, although there was no sign of them now. From his raised vantage-point, he saw what the shape was, and started filming.

It was a dead cow. It was already bloating, its belly swelling from the gases trapped within, and its eye peered at him with baleful solemnity. Its tongue trailed from its open mouth, leached to a pale grey by the water. Its tail drifted after it like an eel. There was another beyond it, he saw, and more beyond that. A herd, or flock, or whatever a group of cows was called, trapped by the water and drowned.

Drowned? Well, probably, but one of the further animals looked odd. Kapenda zoomed in, focusing as he did so. The dead creature’s side was a ragged mess, with strips of peeled flesh and hide along its flank exposing the muscles below. Here and there, flashes of white bone were visible. Its neck was similarly torn, the vertebrae visible through the damaged flesh. As he filmed, the creature spun more violently as a current caught it, slamming it into a tree-trunk; the collision left scraps of meat clinging to the bark. Kapenda carried on filming as the cow whirled away, watching as it caught on something under the water, jerked and then suddenly submerged, bobbing back up before vanishing again. A great bubble of air, so noxious Kapenda could smell it from his distant perch, emerged from where the cow had gone down.

It was as Kapenda climbed down from the roof that he saw the thing in the hedgerow.

It was jammed, glinting, into the tangle of branches and leaves about four feet from the ground. From the surface of the water, he amended. Leaving his camera in the jeep, he moved cautiously towards the glint, feeling ahead with his feet. The ground dropped away as he stepped off the solid surface of the road, the water rising against him. It came to his thighs and then his waist; he took his wallet and phone from his jeans and zipped them into his jacket’s inner pocket; they were already in plastic bank bags, sealed against the damp. Carefully, not wanting to slip, lose his footing and be washed away like the cows, he leaned into the hedgerow and pushed his arm into it. The thing was tantalisingly out of reach. He pushed in harder, felt his feet shift along the submerged earth and then he was over, falling into the water and going under.

It was cold, clenching his head in its taut embrace and squeezing. Kapenda kicked but his feet tangled into something—branches or roots—and were held fast. Something large and dark, darker than the water around him, banged into him, began to roll over him and force him further under the water. He wanted to breathe, knew if he opened his mouth he’d take in water and drown, and clenched his jaw. The thing on him was heavy, clamped onto his shoulder and was it biting him, Jesus yes, it was biting him and pushing him down and he was trapped, was under it and couldn’t shift it and then something grasped his other shoulder, hard, and he was pulled up from the water.

“No! No! Let him be!” It was David, hauling Kapenda from the water, pulling him back to the jeep. “What were you doing in the water? You could have bloody drowned!”