Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Kapenda collapsed to his knees, back into the water but held up by the jeep, and vomited. His breakfast came out in a soup of dirty liquid, the sight of it making him wretch even more.

“Are you okay? Do you need to go to the doctor? The hospital?” David was calmer now, more concerned than angry.

“No,” said Kapenda after a moment. “I think I’m okay. What was it?”

“A dead cow,” said David after a moment. “What were you doing, going into the water?”

“I saw something in the hedge,” said Kapenda, and it sounded ridiculous even as he said it. He managed to rise to his feet, using the side of the jeep as a support. Water dripped from him.

“Let me see then,” said David. The man looked paler in the daylight, as though he was somehow less there, his dead eye bulging from a face that was round and wan. Its milky iris peered at Kapenda. His other eye was dark, the sclera slightly yellowing. Was he a heavier drinker than he’d appeared the night before? He had patches of rough skin, Kapenda saw, dried and peeling.

There was a bike leaning against the back of the jeep and Kapenda was suddenly struck with the image of David cycling down the centre of the road, his front wheel cutting a ‘V’ though the water, his feet submerging and re-emerging with each revolution of the pedals, and it made him smile.

“Now, let’s see this thing you were prepared to drown to get,” said David, also smiling.

“Oh, I—” started Kapenda, about to say that it was still in the hedge, and then realised it wasn’t. He was holding it.

It was a small figure, made from some dull metal. It had a suggestion of legs and arms and a face that was nested in tentacles, its eyes deep-set and its mouth a curved-down arc. Was it an octopus? A squid? A long chain dangled from it, fine-linked and dully golden. More figures were hooked to some of the chain’s links, tiny things like toads with swollen genitalia and fish with arms and legs. David held the figure up by the chain, peering at it.

“What is it?” Kapenda asked.

David didn’t answer. Instead, he spun it, watching as it caught the pallid light. Its surface was smooth, but Kapenda had the impression it was the smoothness of age and wear, that the ghosts of old marks still lay under its skin. Finally, David spoke, muttering under his breath, words that Kapenda didn’t catch.

“Do you know what it is?” asked Kapenda. He was starting to shiver, the shock and the cold catching him. He wanted to go back to the hotel and dry off, warm up.

“Yes,” said David. “I saw one once, as a child, and I hoped not to see one again so soon. Still, I suppose it explains a lot.” He rubbed one of the patches of dry skin on his neck slowly.

“The water’s coming, my friend,” he said, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Its time is here again. Well, if you’re sure you’re okay to drive, I’ll leave you be. Take my advice, stay out of the water.”

“I will,” said Kapenda, “and thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” said David and coughed again, his own private punctuation. He winked his sightless eye once more and then went and mounted his bike, wheeling it around to point back to Grovehill. Moments later all Kapenda could see of him was his back, hunched over the handlebars as he went down the road. Behind him, tiny waves spread out across the water and then broke apart.

It was only when Kapenda got back into the jeep that he remembered the bite—sure enough, his jacket was torn in two semicircles, to the front and rear of his shoulder, and the skin below bruised but not broken. He got back out of the jeep to try and see the cow but it must have floated off, and the only thing to see was the flood, ever restless and ever hungry.

* * *

The house collapsed just after lunch.

They were filming at the rope barrier again, this time framing the talent against a shot down the street to show how the water wasn’t retreating. “Forecasters say that, with the recent rainfall, the water levels aren’t expected to recede until at least tomorrow, and if more rain comes it could conceivably be several days or more,” Plumb intoned. “Great sections of the South-West are now underwater, economies ruined and livelihoods and lives destroyed. Even today, we’ve heard of two more deaths, a woman and child who drowned in their lounge in the village of Arnold, several miles from here. Questions are being asked of the defences that the government installed and why the Environment Agency wasn’t better prepared. Here, the people merely wait, and hope.”