Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I am hidden, but lovely, O ye daughters of darkness. They kept him from me. I remember thy love more than life. Let him kiss me with his mouths. Thy name is as fear poured forth. Lead me, I will wait for thee.

Each page dated; I can see a series of different years. How many? Oh, God, how many?

The grandfather clock interrupts me as I kneel there on the floor. It chimes the quarter-hour and I watch the hands move. The office door opens and Tilly’s soft voice, rich with anticipation, a little fear, calls “Doctor Croftmarsh? It’s time.”

“Tilly. Tilly, you have to get away from here.” I scramble up off my knees, try to move towards her at the same time, stumble twice before I stand and manage to get a hand on her arm. The touch is as much to steady me as to underline my point to her. “There’s something going on. We have to go—we’ll go out through the kitchens, no one will see us—”

“Doctor Croftmarsh, don’t be ridiculous,” she says, barely concealing disdain. I tighten my fingers around her wrist. She jerks her arm away.

“No, Tilly, I’m not being silly. Something is happening and you’re in danger.”

“No,” she says, smiling, but I can’t quite fathom the demeanour. “I’m not in danger—He has called my name and I will heed him. He will know me and choose me for I am new.”

And all at once I know that inimitable combination of tone and expression: triumph and malice, jealousy and hope. The child thinks she is part of a greater mystery. She thinks Thackeray will—will what? Despair and desperation well up inside me as rhythmic pulses of pain.

We stare at each other, time seemingly marching in place until, at last, there is the sound of the final flick of the clock hands shifting into place. Mechanisms begin to sing midnight and all of my agonies fall away. I smile at the girl and offer my hand in conciliation.

VII

FEBRUARY 18TH

If thou know not, O thou greatest among beasts,

Send me dreams so I might guess,

and kill the flock by the shepherds’ tents.

With my free hand I hook the edge of the tapestry and pull. The right half of it hangs from a rail separate to that for the left, so, when drawn across, the picture changes, the forest folded back upon itself becomes a creature, muscular, tentacled, winged; the broken stones become a second throne and the lord’s limbs, now seen true, caress his bride in lewd love.

More importantly, this redecoration shows a door in the wall behind the arras, a door which leads down to the academy’s rarely used chapel; to the undercroft more precisely. I wrench it open and a whiff of dust puffs out. Dust and something else, like long-dead fish.

“Come, Tilly,” I say. There is no answer. I turn to look at her; she is staring at the hanging. I take her face in my hands, run my fingers through her hair, tender as a mother. I kiss her on the forehead, a chaste embrace, and say, “You were right: you have been called, Tilly, and you are needed. You are anointed, the coming one. And He will know your name and I shall see you covered in the throes of glory before this night is out.”

In the darkness, I can see with the unerring stare of a creature from the deep. In her gaze is my reflection, my features rewritten by my memories, my true memories: eyes set wide and angled up, icthyoid and protuberant, pouting lips, flattened nose. And the hair, a waving tangle of green-black tentacles, a-shiver with a life of their own. I stretch, my bones cracking. I am taller.

The girl’s expression is stunned. “Doctor Croftmarsh?”

I nod and smile, my teeth sharp and liberally spaced. The girl shudders. Some panic at this moment, the imminence of death shaking them from the enchantment of being chosen; some go quietly. Tilly, I suspect, is beginning to realise that she did not take note of the fine print in the deal that was struck. I lock a webbed hand around her wrist and pull her towards her destiny.

My head is full of things long-forgotten, long set aside so that I—we—might hide and survive. Today, this anniversary of the Fall of Innsmouth, of my Lord’s terrible injuries and afflictions, of his ever-dying, this day the memories are whole. They do not afflict me. They are mine and they rest easy in the pan of my skull.