Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Really. It was chaos, thousands of people made homeless, streets full of mud and water and corpses. In Krymsk, everything got washed into the Black Sea, and the harbour was blocked with debris for weeks after. The local sea-life was well fed, though.”

“Jesus,” said Kapenda.

“Yeah,” said Rice. “You’d see them, dark shapes in the water, and then some floating body would suddenly vanish. The official estimate for Krymsk was one hundred and seventy dead, or thereabouts, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t far higher though. I had a friend covered the Pakistan floods, was in Sindh and Balochistan, and he told me there were things like that there as well, hanging from the trees just above the flood-line.”

“The same things?”

“Yeah,” said Rice again. “And I’ll tell you one other thing that’s odd.”

“What?”

“That old woman that died in the flood at St. Asaph the other week? That drowned in her home? There was one hanging outside her house, and one outside the house of the mother and child that drowned yesterday.”

“What? How do you know?”

Rice merely smiled at Kapenda. I have my sources, the smile said, and I’m keeping them secret. “Keep it safe,” he said as he turned and went back to the bar, “you never know when you might need protection against the water.”

* * *

Needham was in a bad mood.

It was the next morning, and he had been trying to find someone local to interview. He wanted the talent to do some empathy work, get Plumb to listen sympathetically and nod as some teary bumpkin showed them their drenched possessions and talked about how their pictures of Granny were lost forever, but there wasn’t anyone.

“They won’t talk to you?” asked Kapenda.

“They’ve all fucking vanished!” said Needham. “There’s no one in the emergency shelters, no one worth mentioning anyway, and they certainly aren’t staying at any of the farms, I’ve checked. Most of them have been abandoned too. The police aren’t sure when anyone’s gone, or they’re not saying if they know.”

“They must be somewhere,” said Kapenda.

“Must they? Well I don’t know where to fucking find them,” said Needham.

“Perhaps they all swam away?” said Plumb and laughed. Neither Kapenda nor Needham joined in.

“It’ll be dead cows and flooded fucking bushes again, you’ll see,” said Needham, disconsolate. “Isaac, can’t you find me something new?”

“I’ll try,” said Kapenda.

* * *

David was standing in the water in one of the fields a little further out from Grovehill. Kapenda saw his bike first, leaning against the hedge and half underwater, and pulled the jeep over to see what the man was doing. There was a stile in the hedge and David was beyond it, out into the field proper. Kapenda waded to the wooden gate and climbed it, perching on the top and calling, “Hello!”

“‘For Behold’,” said David loudly, his voice rolling across the water, “‘I will bring a flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under Heaven.’ Hello, Isaac. They knew, you see—they understood.”

“Who knew? Understood what?”

“We have always waited for the water’s call, those of us with the blood, waited for the changes to come, but now? Some of us have called to it, and it has come.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kapenda. He wished he had brought his camera—David looked both lonely and somehow potent, standing up to his chest in the water, his back to Kapenda. It was raining again, the day around them grey and murky.

“What are you doing?”

“It has been brought this far but I worry,” said David, his voice lower, harder for Kapenda to hear. “How much further? How much more do we want? And what of what comes after us? The sleeping one whose symbol you found, Isaac? It wants the world, drowned and washed clean, but clean of what? Just of you? Or of everything—of us as well? We should have stayed in the deeps, but no, we have moved into the shallows and we prepare the way as though we were cleaning the feet of the sleeping one, supplicants to it. We might be terrible, Isaac, but after us? Do you have a god? Pray for its mercy, for the thing that comes after us—the thing that we open the way for—will be awful and savage beyond imagining.”

“David, what are you talking about?”

“The water, Isaac. It’s always about the water.” David turned—in the fractured, mazy light, his face was a white shift of moonlike intensity. His eyes were swollen, turning so that they appeared to be looking to opposite sides of his head. His skin looked like old linen, rough and covered in dry and flaking patches. He seemed to have lost his hair and his neck had folded down over itself in thick, quivering ridges. “It would be best for you to leave, Isaac. You have been saved from the water once, but I suspect that once is all.”

“David, please, I still don’t know what you mean. Tell me what you’re talking about.”