Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

The academy is a large place, a great building in the Gothic style, four long wings joined to make a square, with a broad green quadrangle in the middle. Two sides of the structure face the sea, looking out over the epic cliff drop; the other two are embraced by the woods and the well-tended grounds. The nearest town is ten miles distant. There is a teaching staff of twenty, three cooks, four cleaners, two gardeners and a cadre of two hundred-odd students.

As a child, I was occasionally sent to stay with an acquaintance of my parents, here in this very house, before its owners’ dipping fortunes made a change of hands essential, and it became a school for exceptional orphans. I recollect very little about those visits, having but dim impressions of many rooms, large and dust-filled, corridors long and portrait-lined, and bed chambers stuffed with canopied beds, elaborate dressers and wardrobes that loomed towards one in the night like trolls creeping from beneath bridges. I remember waking from nightmares of the place, begging my mother and father not to be sent there again.

It was only after they were gone, when I was grown and qualified, seeking employment and a quiet retreat after the accident, that I saw an advertisement for a history teacher. It seemed like the perfect opportunity. I have been here for a year.

This is what I’m told I remember.

I’m assured it’s one of those things, this kind of amnesia that takes away some recollections and leaves others—I retain everything I must know in order to teach. I keep every bit of study I ever undertook tucked under my intellectual belt. I memorised the things that have happened since I came here. I may even recall the car accident—or at least, I have a sense of an explosion, of flying through the air, of terrible, intense pain—but I’m never quite sure what I can actually invoke of that time.

I suppose I am fortunate to be alive when my parents are not. I’ve been promised that many people I once knew are dead, but I’m uncertain whether I actually feel a loss. There are no remnants of that old life, no photos of my parents and me. No holiday snaps, no foolish playing-around in the backyard photos. I have no box of mementoes, no inherited jewellery, no ancient teddy bear with its fur loved off. Nothing that might provide proof of my growing up, of my youth, of my being.

I fear I have no true memory of who I am.

In the same notebook where I make my translations, in the very back pages are the scribbles I write to remind myself of who I am supposed to be. I read them over and again: I am Vivienne Croftmarsh. I have a Ph.D. I teach at the academy. I am an only child and now an orphan. I translate ancient poetry as a pastime.

This is who I am.

This is what I tell myself.

But I cannot shake the feeling that something is working loose, that the world around me is softening, developing cracks, threatening to crumble. I can’t say why. I cannot deny a sense of formless dread. My hands are beginning to ache; I rub at the slight webbing between the fingers, massaging the tenderness there.

“Wake up, dreamy-drawers.” Fenella Burrows is the closest thing I have to a friend here; she plants herself and her lunch tray across from me at the deserted end of the table I’ve chosen. Most of the faculty take the hint and stay away, but not her, and I don’t mind. She tells me we went to school together, but isn’t offended when I am unable to reminisce. She jerks her head towards the journal and my ink-stained fingers. “How’s it going?”

“Getting there. Second verse.”

“Second verse, same as the first,” she snorts. Fenella throws back her head when she laughs, all the mouse-brown curls tumbling down her back like a waterfall. She leans in close and says, “Don’t look now, but Thackeray is watching you.”

I pull a face, don’t turn my head. “Thackeray’s always watching.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t think he’s attractive.”

Yes, he is attractive, but he stares too much, seems to see too much, seems to dig beneath my skin with his gaze and pull out secrets I didn’t know were there. That’s the sense I get anyway, but I don’t tell Fenella because it sounds stupid and she clearly finds him appealing. Her smile is limned with the pale green of jealousy. “He’s all yours,” I say.

She sighs. “If only. No one wants the plain bridesmaid.”

“How were your classes this morning?” I ask.

“Tilly Sanderson out-Frenched me.”

“That sounds appalling and punishable by a jail term.”

“Grammar-wise, you fool.” She adds more salt to the unidentifiable vegetarian mush on her plate. I can’t really bear to look at it. Fenella insists it’s an essential tool in her diet plan. I see no evidence: her face is still as round as a pudding and so is she.

“Well, she’s very smart.”

“Yes, but I hate it when the little beasts are smarter than us.” She shovels the mess from her plate to her mouth and seems to chew for a long time.