Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Never fear, Tilly.” The language feels strange in my mouth, the words seemingly square, not sibilant, not long and serpentine, but blocky. I persist, dragging the girl behind me, down into the darkness of the cold stone staircase and the crushing blackness of the undercroft and the tomb. The space is just large enough to fit the rest of the staff, teaching and domestic, all changed, all re-made like me; all clustered in a tenebrous group at the far end of the crypt. “Know that you are a part of something great.”

Here she will breathe her last, her soul, her blood given so that my Lord may heal. A process oh-so-slow, but only on this one day is the barrier between his death and my life thin enough for this service.

In my haste I am clumsy.

In her terror she is strong.

When she kicks at me, I loosen my grip and she pulls away, races in the shadows, back towards the stairs, towards freedom. All the trouble gone to, to cut her from the herd, to groom her, to make her feel special—and she runs. There is the sound of a slap, a grunt.

“Careless,” says Thackeray. “You are not what you were.” He holds the girl still, carries her as a child does a reluctant cat, her back against his chest, her limbs splayed, belly exposed. She no longer struggles. Thackeray offers her to me. I stare into her moon-wide eyes and whisper, “All will be well.”

The talons of my right hand open up her chest, the nightgown then the skin. A silver mist bursts from the hole, followed by a gush of blood, and both are drawn down to the stone of the tomb, then immediately begin to seep through the porous surface.

I hear, as her life pours out, the great booming rhythm of my Lord’s heart, strengthened across aeons, across life and death and the space in between. Such a slow healing.

From the gloom steps Fenella, a broad smile on her plain face. “We must talk, before you grow forgetful again,” she says.

I don’t answer, merely look at the shell of Tilly Sanderson sprawled across my husband’s resting place where Thackeray discarded her. The rhythm of his renewal is loud and I think: If one can do this, then surely a legion…

“You will lose yourself once more,” Fenella continues. “We must discuss matters for the coming year.”

“Tomorrow’s forgetting will be but a dream,” I say, skittering my nails across the top of my Lord’s tomb, finding not a skerrick of blood left there.

I am so tired of waiting.

How many years between Innsmouth and now? How many times have I taken filaments from young heads and selected a fine needle so I may embroider a new flower into the weave of the tapestry, its border growing with each passing sacrifice? How many years have I sat beside a rock and told my Lord, my liege, my love the same tale, of the patient queen who hides away, protecting her beloved from his enemies? The tale of a wife who loses herself for his very sake, who folds the cloak of Vivienne Croftmarsh around her recollections, her histories, and suppresses everything she is, so hunters may not track him through the power of her memory. A woman who sings him his song, his hymn, his dirge, and waits and waits and waits.

A woman who is weary of waiting.

From beneath, from across, I hear him sigh.

“Bring them,” I say to Burrows and Thackeray, who give me blank stares. My voice is thunder when next I speak, and they cringe with the power of my rage. “Bring them all!”

“But—” begins Thackeray and I grab the front of his shirt and lift him off his feet, revelling in the strength of my arm, myself; and knowing, at last, that I am unwilling to once again give up this self. I shake him for good measure.

“Bring them, by twos and threes. Bring them here and we shall see my Lord awake before too many more cycles have passed. I am tired of waiting.”

A new tomorrow is about to dawn on the Esoteric Order’s Orphans Academy. And then, when my Lord shall finally rise again, I shall take my proper place at His side…

THE SAME DEEP WATERS AS YOU

by BRIAN HODGE

THEY WERE DOWN to the last leg of the trip, miles of iron-grey ocean skimming three hundred feet below the helicopter, and she was regretting ever having said yes. The rocky coastline of northern Washington slid out from beneath them and there they were, suspended over a sea as forbidding as the day itself. If they crashed, the water would claim them for its own long before anyone could find them.

Kerry had never warmed to the sea—now less than ever.

Had saying no even been an option? The Department of Homeland Security would like to enlist your help as a consultant, was what the pitch boiled down to, and the pair who’d come to her door yesterday looked genetically incapable of processing the word no. They couldn’t tell her what. They couldn’t tell her where. They could only tell her to dress warm. Better be ready for rain, too.