That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1)

by Emily C. Skaftun

"They're off," I said. "You're just lucky none of the suckers got you. They looked pretty nasty."

  Ellen groaned and tucked her chin against her chest. She was shaking.

  "Did they touch you?" I crouched in front of her.

  Her mouth opened, closed. "I don't know. Maybe?"

  "Let me see."

  I shone the flashlight at her face. Dime-sized welts trailed down the side of her chin to her neck.

  "Holy crap," I said.

  "Is it bad?"

  I cleared my throat, determined to speak calmly. "Does it hurt?"

  "A little," she whispered. "But it's my fault. I shouldn't have scared her."

  "I'm sure it'll be fine." I glanced at the tank. A whoosh of sand went up like a grainy cloud. "We should probably get a doctor to look at it though, just in case."

  "I just wanted--Oh!" she hugged her knees. "I dropped it."

  "What?"

  She was rocking back and forth now, rubbing her chin against her shoulder, scratching the welts.

  "What did you drop, Ellen? Tell me."

  "I dropped my phone in the tank," she muttered. "I just wanted a picture." She rose unsteadily to her feet. "I have to--"

  "I'll get it," I said. "Scooping stuff out of tide pools and tanks is pretty much what I do."

  I took a deep breath and shone the flashlight along the walls. Half-way down the room, on a hook between tanks, I found what I needed: my old friend, a pole with a net on its end. I grabbed the pole and returned to the tank. The water was still cloudy where the creature had swirled up sand.

  "Hey," I said, soothingly. "I don't want to hurt you, little guy. I just need my friend's phone."

  I raised the flashlight at the octo-squid. The creature cringed and lifted Ellen's pink phone above the water, its pale hand glistening in the shaky beam. That was curious. I didn't want to frighten it, so I set the metal pole on the ground. Slow movements.

  "Careful," Ellen said. "Don't be scared." I wasn't sure if she was talking to me or the creature.

  I reached out and gently took the phone. The case was wet and the screen black. I handed the phone to Ellen, looked back at the squid. Sediment was settling around its head-foot, its tentacles undulating around its base.

  The creature lowered its now empty hand below the surface and then, slowly, slowly, waved at me.

  Waved? What the hell. I waved back.

  Then I made a thumbs-up gesture. The creature mimicked the gesture.

  "Shit," I whispered. "Ellen--"

  "Something's wrong." Ellen scratched her neck. "My face feels funny." The welts had thickened, expanding into overlapping lumps. I kept the alarm out of my face.

  Over the water gurgling, I barely heard the outer door open and close. I held my finger to my lips, cocked my head to listen. Footsteps.

  "We have to hide," I whispered.

  Ellen shook her head. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her towards the waist-high pools. They were wide enough for cover, and I hoped we could stay concealed in the shadows when the lights turned on. I crouched under the table with Ellen pressed against me. Her hair smelled like strawberries.

  At the last second, I realized I'd left the metal pole in the aisle. I stretched out my arm and grabbed it just as alternating rows of fluorescents flickered to life, leaving long pockets of shadow between them. I huddled deep in the shadows with Ellen. Doctor G entered, followed by the same thick-necked men we'd seen earlier in the lobby. The men pushed a wheeled cart. All three stopped before the tank with the octo-squid and, with effort, managed to slide the tank onto the cart. As they wheeled past us, I prayed Ellen would stay calm. The lumps on her face had grown to the size of softballs.

  But she was brave. They didn't see us.

  I eased Ellen back on the floor, wadded up my jacket, and stuffed it like a pillow under her head. "Stay here," I said. I was worried. The lumps had turned a vicious purple-red and she was blinking double-time. What if she'd absorbed some kind of venom through the tentacle suckers? She obviously needed medical help, but if I waited a bit longer I might be able to get us out without being seen.

  I peeked out from under the table, careful to stay in the shadows as much as possible. The doctor and the men had stopped at the far end of the room, and appeared to be discussing something. They were turned away for now, but they'd definitely notice if I dragged a half-conscious girl towards the exit. I looked around for an alternate exit, crawling forward with the only weapon I had: the metal pole with the net attached.

  I scanned the room from my hiding spot. The ceiling caught my eye. A red pentagram had been painted directly above where the three men stood.

  Well, damn, I thought.

  Growing up in Arkham, you hear things. Ghost stories wrapped in magickal moon lore with a heaping helping of elder gods and forbidden books, all swapped between boys and girls over dwindling campfires. We collected alternate histories like kids on TV traded baseball cards. As a child of Arkham, you just took for granted you lived in a special town, but seeing that difference up close and personal, in the place where you gave up evenings and weekends so college admissions might think you were well-rounded and responsible, well, seeing that kind of truth was an awful big shock.

  The three men began chanting in a guttural language. This, I knew from the stories, was really, really bad. The men stepped aside to reveal the octo-squid splashing wildly in its tank.

  I shivered and glanced up at the pentagram. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, but the air below it seemed to shimmer and rotate, grow thicker, and take on a grainy texture.

  Something shuffled across the floor behind me. I turned. Ellen was dragging herself across the concrete in my direction. I tried to wave her away, but the chanting was growing louder, and I became distracted.

  Between the men, the octo-squid slammed its fists against the glass again and again. Waves sloshed over the edges of the tank.

  Doctor G produced a knife from his waistband and raised it with the clear intent of plunging it into the creature. I reached for Ellen, to stop her from reacting, but it was too late. She was already screaming, "No!"

  The men froze, turned, and then Ellen was careening towards them, unsteady. The men had no trouble restraining her, she was already so weak. One of them just pinned her hands behind her back.

  "Keep chanting," Doctor G screamed, over the rising wind. "Don't stop."

  I couldn't just sit and watch. Not while they had Ellen. I crawled out from my hiding space and stood, gripping the metal pole firmly in my right hand. "Hey," I said.

  "How many of these kids are out there?" said one of the men. "Thought this place was locked."

  "Say the words!" Doctor G yelled.

  "You can see she's sick," I said. "Let me just take her and go. We won't tell anybody what we saw."

  The men ignored me and continued chanting at the ceiling. Swirling air whipped my hair against my cheeks, filling my nose with the acrid scent of salt and low tide.

  "The portal is opening," Doctor G said, standing alongside the tank. He raised the knife again. Ellen released a blood-curdling scream and clutched her face--just the distraction I needed.

  I ran up and hurled the metal pole at the tank. Glass shattered, water rushed over the sides of the cart, and there was a terrible angry shriek from the sky.

  Massive white tentacles spilled through the swirling clouds on the ceiling. Huge fists attached to those tentacles slammed into Doctor G and his men, sending them skidding across the floor. A different hand clutched each man and swung them upwards one at a time into a waiting black beak poking just beneath the cloud cover. Each man was ripped apart above our heads.

  Meanwhile, Ellen fell to her knees, spasms wracking her body. What once were welts had become huge blister-sacs. Something inside each sac writhed against her neck, her face, strained, and then exploded outwards in a gush of yellow fluid. Tiny octo-squids swarmed from the sacs and skittered down her body, across the floor, and towards the small creature now flopping on
the floor.

  Ellen passed out before the end. She missed the massive tentacle-hand from the sky retrieving the octo-squid and all its offspring. She missed the shimmering clouds dispersing and the winds fading, and she missed the chunks of partially digested man meat hitting the floor of the lab with a series of red, wet thuds.

  But I'd never forget what I saw that night. My dreams made sure of that.

  Later, Ellen would claim not to remember a thing, and the marks on her face would be dismissed as an allergic reaction to shellfish--so much for being a vegetarian. Her parents would take her on an extended vacation, we'd exchange a few letters, but there wouldn't be any substance, and we'd drift apart.

  Local authorities would announce we were all victims of a slow gas leak caused by shoddy pipes. Nobody would question it.

  We were all high and none of it was real. Or we weren't high and all of it was real.

  As a child of Arkham, facts didn't really matter. What mattered was this: I, for one, would never volunteer again.

  * * *

  Wes Hickman currently lives in a landlocked state. Aquariums make him nervous.

  * * *

  Folly Blaine lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has appeared at InfectiveInk.com, Mad Scientist Journal, and in the anthologies, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations and Fresh Blood, Old Bones. As the Podcast Manager for EveryDayFiction.com, Folly has narrated over 80 stories for weekly podcasts. See more at www.follyblaine.com.

  * * *

  Dr. Circe and the Shadow over Swedish Innsmouth

  An account by Callie-Anne Ceres, as provided by Erik Scott de Bie

  * * *

  I was walking down a hallway, which in itself was pretty damn peculiar, considering. The sound of rushing water surrounded me, echoing off the walls of the sewer tunnel.

  Things crept in the dark--slithering things I couldn't see or understand but could only hear and feel, like a persistent cold I couldn't quite shake. Mold hung thick from the ceiling, dripping brackish condensation like blood. It fell on my bare skin, leaving oily wormtrails where it dripped. The mildewed stone felt slippery under my bare feet.

  That's right. I had actual feet, which was past-the-bend strange.

  Nonsense words echoed along the walls. "La yk ullm la," they said, and "la la fhtgan!"

  I was moving toward something that had no name, something that made no sense. Biologically, physically, psychologically, it could not be. Every step was a step deeper into madness. And yet there I was, gladly walking into it like it rung the supper bell.

  A deep croon resonated through the tunnel, caressing my ears and weakening my bowels. Nothing human could make that sound.

  A part of me--and not a small part, mind--wanted to see. Wanted to understand. Science is my whole life, and I live with the certainty that all knowledge is valuable. Truth can hurt sometimes, but the pain's worth it. I pressed forward, even against every instinct cursing me for a fool and screaming at me to turn back.

  I came at last to a curtain of murky water, through which I saw a dim green light. Shadows moved through the water, cast by something unseen. For some reason, I thought if I could just see the terrible thing, I'd understand ... everything. I felt it, deep in my gut.

  I reached into the water, which parted hesitantly around my hand like cream.

  Something lunged at me in the dark and I sucked in a breath to scream.

  #

  My eyes popped open and I found myself staring out the window of my second story boarding house. From here, the storied town of Innsmouth reminded me a bit of a pie my momma once took out of the oven too early: drooping at the edges and soggy in the middle. The snow looked like sugar half-melted into a congealed mass and dripping. Dirty water trailed from the icicles on over-hangings like par-boiled filling made from cherries about two months past season. Wisps of oily smoke trickled up into the sky, escaping from crumbling chimneys that looked like slits in the houses, completing the pie metaphor and making my stomach go all queasy. Not a great feeling, first thing in the morning.

  Cheerful neon lights in some of the less dilapidated storefronts promised hot cocoa and cookies to passersby, of which there were of course none. No one was out on the streets in the early morning, and aside from a few lights and rusted out cars that hadn't moved in years, the place was a snowy graveyard. Down-right homey, for a vampire. Or a serial killer.

  "Oh, gurl," I said to myself, in my lazy Louisiana accent that has prompted so many to underestimate me. "Coulda picked a better spot fer sweet dreams."

  I climbed out of bed, flexing my strong arms against the splintery bedframe. The sweat-damp sheets pooled around my hips in an indecent manner and the air hung thick with the greasy tang of a coal heater. The dream was unsettling, for sure, but I'm a biochemist. I've seen a lot of strange stuff in my time--and created a lot more--but rarely did it intrude on my personal time. And that language, both familiar and alien-like. It drew me and repulsed me, and I just could not put it out of my mind.

  "Where are those cotton-pickin'--ah." I fumbled around the head of the bed and my fingers landed on a smooth shaft of plastic about four inches in diameter and two feet long. Adorning the top was a padded leather brace I designed myself for maximum comfort. I pushed the covers off my missing legs and strapped on the prosthetics one at a time, then rolled up the stockings that had slipped down to the ankles. Momma always told me to dress proper.

  A discreet knock came at the door. Marian, my landlady at the Innsmouth Jellyfish B&B, always seemed to know when I wanted breakfast. "Hang on, Sugah!"

  I shrugged on my B&B-provided threadbare robe, which was a little improvement over the chill. Like all things in Innsmouth, it seemed about a hundred years old. I positioned my sweet self in the middle of the room, smoothed my curly strawberry blonde hair as best I could without a shower, and beamed.

  "Ah'm decent. C'mon in."

  The ancient curled handle turned, and the door creaked open. Marian--I never did catch her last name--was a stocky bear of a woman, her rectangular body the same width from shoulder to knee. Dark eyes under gray eyebrows hinted at a life spent weighing and judging people. She reminded me of Doctor Marta Rosenbaum, my favorite Advanced Particle Physics professor, but without the degrees and Swedish rather than German. Same crazy eyes, though.

  "Breakfast." Marian's accent was a collision between a Massachusetts drawl and Scandinavian flow. She held a tray of steaming oatmeal, bacon, eggs, and blood pudding. The dream had gone and left me as ravenous as if I'd run ten miles on my blades. Which, in point of fact, I did once. Can't recommend it.

  Marian set down the tray on the little table and looked around me at my desk, which was haphazardly strewn with papers and glass jars with murky contents. It'd be impolite to mention it, so I just shifted my weight to the side to block her, and smiled when Marian looked up at my face.

  "You out, today?" Marian asked. She weren't never one to use four words when three would do.

  "Just a walk out on the beach," I said. "Take in the sights."

  "You walk on the beach every day." My landlady looked suspicious. "Good beach?"

  "The best." I smiled even broader. "Sit an' stay a spell?"

  That made Marian back up a step. It was a dance we went through every morning: Marian got all nosy for a hint about what had brought the highly degreed bio-engineer to Innsmouth, I tried to engage her in polite conversation, and she retreated like I insulted her. She nodded, mumbled something, and headed out the door.

  I set down to breakfast at the work table, brushing aside papers covered in mathematical scrawl and a short-hand only I could work out. I left the blood pudding untouched, being not terrible strong of stomach, but devoured the bacon and eggs, and set to work on the oatmeal, which could use a little more protein, in my opinion. As I munched, I glanced over my latest notes thoughtfully.

  It was probably for the best that Marian hadn't seen any of the papers. Not that my research would mean much to anyone but the reviewers at an ac
ademic journal, but to the untrained eye, my work could look ... unflattering. The sketches were bad enough, but certain words caught the imagination in all the wrong ways. "Hybrid," "amphibious humanoid," "membranous anomaly," and--most of all--"deep ones."

  That last came from pre-mission research, back in Boston where the web still existed. I knew as much about Innsmouth's past as could be gleaned from the Wikipedia page, which had last been updated over twenty years ago, apparently by a thirteen year old Lovecraft fan. Lots of legends of creatures in the sewer, who held court beneath the dark waves and exchanged gold and fish for blood sacrifices. I knew about the governmental bombing of 1928, which apparently the Bureau could not verify, and about the town's economic hardships since then. Apparently it had seen a boom in the early twenty-first century, returning to the ship-building that had made it successful two hundred years before, but all but collapsed after the economic collapse of '08. Now, fifteen years later, it was a ghost town, though recent reports of "Deep Ones" had spurred a tourism revival the last few seasons.

  I set the spoon down, the filling oatmeal warm inside my belly. "Ancient magic, antediluvian earth goddesses, bio-engineered man-cheetahs, yes, but primeval alien gods from beneath the waves? Now that's just plumb crazy."

  Still, the Bureau demanded results, and I wasn't finished yet. In a world where magic is a verifiable reality, who knew if these sightings were just hearsay to bring in gawkers, or the genuine article? And if they were real, then they might be a threat.

  What I needed was a sample, something other than the moldering pieces of fish carcasses I'd collected from the shores of the bay or the streets and stored in mason jars. I'd analyzed the samples in detail, but found nothing out of the ordinary about them.

  I bundled up against the New England chill and headed out.

  #