Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Getting his thoughts together, he nodded and said, “The real reason is that shortly after that damn Twisted Tower was raised when They first got here, after they came down from the stars and up from the sea, or wherever, the only time anyone went anywhere near the Twisted Tower voluntarily—‘to find out what it was like’ I’ve heard it said, if you can credit someone would do such a thing!—the damn fool came out again a ragged, shrieking lunatic who couldn’t do anything but scream a few mad words over and over again. ‘The Bgg’ha Zone!’ he would scream, laughing and skittering around and pointing at that mile-high monstrosity where it stands dead-centre of things. And: ‘The Twisted Tower!’ he would yelp like a dog. But he was harmless except to himself, and making those noises and a mess was all he did until they bound and gagged him to keep him quiet. Then his heart gave out and he died with a wet gag in his mouth and the froth of madness drying on his chin…”

“You talk too much and too loudly,” I told him. “And if I really should be as afraid of this place as you make out, then what in God’s name are you doing here?” Before he could answer I shook another Marlboro from its pack, lit it, took a drag and handed it to him. I had no reason to antagonise the old boy.

“God’s name?” he turned his head and stared at me where we sat amidst the rubble, on the remains of a toppled brick wall; stared at me with his bloodshot eyes—his sunken, crying eyes that he’d rubbed until they were a rough, raw red—before accepting and sucking on that second cigarette. And: “Oh, I have my reasons for being here,” he said. “Nothing to do with God, though. Not the God we used to pray to, anyway; not unless I’m here as His agent, sort of working for Him without really being aware of it. In which case you might think He would have chosen a better way to set things up.”

“You’re not making a lot of sense,” I told him, “and you’re still much too noisy. Won’t they hear you? Don’t they sometimes patrol outside the Bgg’ha Zone? I’ve heard they do.”

“Patrols?” He took a deep drag, handed my smoke back to me, and went on: “You mean the hunters? And do you know what they hunt? They hunt us! We’re it! Meat!”

He took back the cigarette, and after another drag and a sly, sidelong glance at me from eyes still bloodshot but narrowed now: “Anyway, and like I said, I have a good reason for being here. A damn good reason!” And he balanced a small, battered, heavy-looking old suitcase on his thighs, using his free hand to hug it to his belly.

“But as for right now—” he continued after a brief moment’s pause, while the look he was directing at me became rather more pointed, “—I reckon it’s your turn to state why you are here. I never saw you before, and I don’t think you’re from the SSR… So?”

“The SSR?”

“The South Side Resistance, for what they’re worth—huh!” he answered. But I wasn’t really listening. Having taken back my smoke again, I was watching his veined right hand moving to rest on the gun at his bony hip, as again he asked, “So?”

“I stay alive by moving around,” I told him. “I don’t stay too long in any one place, and I live however I can. I go where there’s food, when and where I can find it, and cigarettes, and on rare occasions a little booze.”

“The old grocery stores? The shattered shops?”

“Yes, of course.” I nodded. “Where else? The supermarkets that were—those that aren’t already completely looted out. In the lighter hours, the few short hours of partial daylight when those things sleep, if they sleep, I dig among the ruins; but stuff is getting very hard to find. Day by day, week by week, it’s harder all the time, which is why I move around. I ended up here just a couple of days ago. At least I think it was days; you never can tell in this perpetual dusk. I haven’t seen the sun for quite some time now, and even then it was very low on the horizon, right at the beginning of this… this—”

“—This long last night?” he helped me out. “The long last night of the human race, and certainly of Henry Chattaway!”

Then he sobbed, and only just managed to catch it before it leaked out of him, but I heard it anyway. And: “My God, how and why did this bloody mess happen to us?” Craning his neck he looked up to where black wisps of cloud scudded across the sky, as if searching for an answer up there—from God, perhaps?

“So—er, Henry?—in fact you are a believer,” I said, standing up from the broken wall and dropping my smoke before it could burn my fingers. “What do you reckon, then—that we’re all career sinners and paying for it?” I stepped on the glowing cigarette end, crushing it out in the red dust of powdered bricks.