And because of that, and also because of the disturbances which now appeared to be affecting him physically—the way the movements of his gross, still-unseen body caused his cloak to heave and shudder with some deep inner passion as he swayed from side to side and began to toss his awful head, and the way his glutinous voice had been growing more and more coarse and phlegmy—because of these things I once again made as if to rise.
For I needed to be away from there, from that once but no longer idyllic place, that strange Greek bay, and away from him, both of which were now so utterly alien to me. But my legs were weak—from the swimming or the chill of a perfectly understandable dread that had risen in me, I couldn’t say; probably from both. For by then I more than fancied I was in the company of a raving madman, and in a way that I could barely explain to myself I found myself hoping that this was so! But I tripped as I attempted to rise, stumbled and at once sat down again. And, helpless to stop my jaw from falling open, I gaped in frozen astonishment, completely petrified as the changes in my stranger’s weird appearance continued to take place, evolving more monstrously yet.
I had seen motion in that robe or cassock, that garment of his, before—seen it move when he seemed angered or agitated—but now its entire surface was moving, rippling like the small waves on a pool when a pebble strikes the water. The color of the ripples was a translucent purple similar to the faded pastel shade or living flush that I had seen in certain jellyfish, in the ichor of various tropical conches, and in the fascinating color-changing displays of cuttlefishes … as if in some fantastic way the garment was reacting to its owner’s excitement, his passions! But as for what those emotions were doing to the man himself:
Beneath the robe’s cowl—which was also horribly mobile, fluttering away from the stranger’s face as if trying to turn back on itself—his great head was a mutable mass of blurred, vibrating flesh. His eyes, bulging even further from their sockets, glared at me as he leaned forward; and it dawned on me that I had not once seen those eyes blink! But the rest of his face … those pulsing slits, or overlapping flaps of flesh in the sides of his neck … the wobbling and apparently boneless blob where a chin should be … his obsolete nose and rudimentary or atrophied ears … and worst of all his cicatrices—or those coiled bas-relief shapes which I had assumed were cicatrices—which appeared to be twisting and twining, pulsing and throbbing, shrinking and bloating! It was all far too much, too terrifying. And the thought occurred that I was actually looking at an alien, a thing from some far world—which in a sense he was—or at best something that might once have been a man! And:
“Ah, see!” He burst in on my thoughts and nightmarish conclusions. “You are doing it again! I can see it in your face … your fear … your intense loathing! But myself, I knew no fear or horror when I saw that poor, faltering youth … that stumbling travesty that a handful of local dimwits believed was some sort of retard or imbecile, for I felt an indisputable kinship! His mother, dusky descendant of strange islands and liaisons that she was, she had seen it in me, too … she had known immediately, instinctively, that my blood was the same as hers, the legacy of an elder race … It was why she had saved me with her cold saltwater massages, her eel and octopus oils and myriad other exotic balms, potions, poisons and even prayers to the protean gods of ocean.
“But alas, she told me in her own blunt and uncultivated, mainly unschooled fashion, in order to save my life and revitalize me, she had found it necessary to accelerate my … my transformation. Unfortunately, in so doing she had overstepped herself, had gone too far. And now there was no going back.
“I tried to deny what she was telling me; I was and always had been a wholly human being, a man, I told her … until she inquired: Had I known my parents? No, I was obliged to answer; I had been found in the wild, wrapped in seaweeds and abandoned on a beach at the tide’s reach. ‘Ah!’ she said then: abandoned by my mother, or perhaps my father, or possibly both, who had known … known what they had brought into this world and couldn’t face it, and perhaps in their way had hoped the sea would take it back where … where I belonged! For this dusky lady knew that she was not the only being from distant lands—not the only one come down from ancient stock—who walked the sands at England’s ocean’s rim and felt not only the tide’s surge but also the surging of her changeling blood.
“But I asked her, what of me now? And what of your son who goes to sea with his father to lure the fishes?
“‘He can go no further,’ she replied. He had to remain as he was, where he was, suffering the loneliness in silence. For he was incomplete, ill-equipped, and if he tried to take to the sea it would kill him. But as for me—
“Yes, I again urged her. What of me?
“‘You are even further, much further down the road to the sea! And if you would survive you may not stay here. Before you are seen to be … to be different, you must move on. For there are places in all the many oceans that are suited to you, as you are destined to be.’
“And she also told me of a place she knew of in the middle sea, a place that was deep and completely unknown to men, whose dwellers would accept me while I lived out my life … the oh-so-long life that she had bequeathed me. Thus I came here to complete my change. And now the tale—my tale, as I am sure you know—is told.”
With which he arose and approached me. But when I say that he “arose,” that hardly says it all. For while he had been telling me his story, during all that time he had not really been seated, or only half so. No, he had been merely resting, leaning against the slab of fallen rock, which now became apparent as he straightened and stood a little taller, but not too tall, before slithering toward me.
Still frozen as if hypnotized, incapable of any meaningful movement of my own, with my mouth gaping, trying to utter some incoherent thing, but lost for words and failing, I sat there with my equipment bag over my trembling knees, my impotent speargun still propped against the rock; impotent because I just couldn’t find the strength to reach for it, and I didn’t want to disturb this mad creature any more than he or it was already disturbed.
“But see”—he coughed the words out as, bending a little, he thrust his face close to mine and enveloped me in that awful rotting-weed foulness—“even now I cannot help myself … I am still drawn to this land that calls to me mockingly yet is forbidden to me. For I cannot—I may not—stay here in your world, in this world, which men accept as their birthright. For my world is out there … out there in the deeps!”
“I—I—” I somehow managed to gulp, almost choking on that pointless stuttering and in effect meaningless repetition. But:
“No, no—don’t you ‘I—I’ me!” he blurted. “Say nothing—but only watch! For while I have told you all, even paying you to listen, still I have proved very little. The proof lies in what remains. And so farewell …”
With which he smiled—if I may call what he did with his hideous face a smile—and I saw that the teeth behind his fat fish-lips were small, razor-sharp triangles like those of a piranha! Then, gurgling with mad, viscous, sobbing laughter, finally he turned away.
At last, capable of movement, I did as he had requested of me, turning my head to follow his movements as he squirmed away from me and made for the now sullen sea. And just exactly as he had stated, the proof was there in what remained.
He squirmed, yes, and I then saw how completely mistaken I had been. I had thought that he wore some kind of cloak or cassock. Wrong, for his all-enveloping, purple-tinted canopy was in fact a part of him: a mantle, most definitely, but in no way an article of clothing. It was more properly a mollusk’s mantle—the flexible outer-layer or “skin” of an octopus’s or sea snail’s protective sheath. And its hood, drawn back so revealingly now, was a part of that sheath; while beneath the hood a misshapen head …
… was frog-or fishlike, a bulging warty blob … and the neck with those throbbing gill-slits … and that face when he turned his head to look back … those eight tightly coiled raised mar
kings which I had believed were cicatrices or self-inflicted scars, except they were no such thing but twelve-inch, suckered tentacles, writhing as they now uncoiled! But the worst came as his mantle lifted like a skirt, shaking itself to be rid of the damp, clinging sand at the sea’s rim … the sight of his huge, bulbous, however truncated body, itself supported by—but I simply can’t say by how many—fat, blue-black tentacles like a great convulsing nest of rubbery, alien snakes. And above what passed for lower limbs, the purple-glistening softness of upper parts, with never a sign of normal human arms!
I saw all of that, and also the trail left by the heaving propulsive contractions and expansions of those massive nether members: the way the sand was sculpted into a swirling, zigzag pattern, much like the earlier impressions those youths had made in dragging the weathered limb of a waterlogged tree back down to the sea—and exactly like the track this creature had carved into prominence on leaving the sea to make his way here while I was swimming!
And now finally he was returning to the sea, leaving me alive, entire and uninjured, however shaken and in doubt of my own five senses. But then, at the very end, there came the occurrence that brought everything else I had experienced into horrific focus, burning itself into my brain so intensely that I know I shall never forget it. It was simply this:
That as this protean thing sank into the water, he turned and waved a last farewell. But how, with no arms to wave? The answer is this: that he waved with his terrible face!
I do not remember escaping from that place, climbing the cliff-hewn path and returning to the resort, but my dreams have been inescapable. Perhaps I should have hurled that golden medallion into the sea, but I did not. Along with the other specimens in my collection, the thing has this unmentionable attraction all its own. And it seems possible, however much I try to resist admitting it, that there is a reason.
For now I ask myself these questions:
What involuntary impulse—what images of a weird paradise—had drawn me to that lonely bay in the first place? And what was it in the monstrous being’s tale that continues to haunt me despite that I refuse to accept its relevance? For the fact is that while I grew to adulthood in the keeping of loving, watchful parents, they were not my natural parents. Having been adopted from an orphanage, I had no knowledge of my real mother and father, though the man I had called Father had once told me that he was the brother of he who sired me. So much he told me, and then no more. But keeping in mind such an alleged relationship, then there are those coins he left me, those now sinister disks with their own fateful attraction. Did he perhaps inherit them from his brother, my real father?
Moreover, despite my nightmarish experience in that little Greek bay, I still have this love of the sea and dream of deeps I can only describe as Elysian, however alien.
But there, none of my fancies or fears may be real, and in both heart and mind I strive to convince myself that I was born of and for this earth, the ground under my feet, and not the surging ocean. At times I feel certain of this, yes—
But still I know that for the rest of my life, no matter how long, I shall continue my daily ritual of examining myself—my entire body head to toe—oh-so-very, very carefully …
BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H. P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own highly enthusiastic fan following for his worldwide bestselling series of Necroscope® vampire books. After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel Beneath the Moors. Since then he has published numerous novels and collections and won the British Fantasy Award for his short story “Fruiting Bodies.” More recent works by Lumley from William Schafer’s Subterranean Press include The Möbius Murders, a long novella set in the Necroscope® universe, and The Compleat Crow, reprinting all the short adventures and longer novellas in the saga of Titus Crow. He is a recipient of the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and World Fantasy Convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Nixie of the Mill-Pond
There was once upon a time a miller who lived with his wife in great contentment. They had money and land, and their prosperity increased year by year more and more. But ill-luck comes like a thief in the night. As their wealth had increased so did it again decrease, year by year, and at last the miller could hardly call the mill in which he lived his own. He was in great distress and, when he lay down after his day’s work, found no rest, but tossed about in his bed, sorely troubled.
One morning he rose before daybreak and went out into the open air, thinking that perhaps there his heart might become lighter. As he was stepping over the mill-dam the first sunbeam was just breaking forth, and he heard a rippling sound in the pond. He turned around and perceived a beautiful woman, rising slowly out of the water. Her long hair, which she was holding off her shoulders with her soft hands, fell down on both sides, and covered her white body.
He soon saw that she was the nixie of the mill-pond, and in his fright did not know whether he should run away or stay where he was.
But the nixie made her sweet voice heard, called him by his name, and asked him why he was so sad.
The miller was at first struck dumb, but when he heard her speak so kindly, he took heart, and told her how he had formerly lived in wealth and happiness, but that now he was so poor that he did not know what to do.
“Be easy,” answered the nixie. “I will make you richer and happier than you have ever been before, only you must promise to give me the young thing which has just been born in your house.”
What else can that be, thought the miller, but a puppy or a kitten? and he promised her what she desired.
The nixie descended into the water again, and he hurried back to his mill, consoled and in good spirits.
He had not yet reached it, when the maid-servant came out of the house and cried to him to rejoice, for his wife had given birth to a little boy. The miller stood as if struck by lightning. He saw very well that the cunning nixie had been aware of it, and had cheated him.
Hanging his head, he went up to his wife’s bedside. And when she said, “Why do you not rejoice over the fine boy?” he told her what had befallen him, and what kind of a promise he had given to the nixie.
“Of what use to me are riches and prosperity,” he added, “if I am to lose my child? But what can I do?”
Even the relatives, who had come thither to wish them joy, did not know what to say.
In the meantime prosperity again returned to the miller’s house. All that he undertook succeeded. It was as if presses and coffers filled themselves of their own accord, and as if money multiplied nightly in the cupboards.
It was not long before his wealth was greater than it had ever been before. But he could not rejoice over it untroubled, for the bargain which he had made with the nixie tormented his soul. Whenever he passed the mill-pond, he feared she might ascend and remind him of his debt.
He never let the boy himself go near the water. “Beware,” he said to him, “if you do but touch the water, a hand will rise, seize you, and draw you down.”
But as year after year went by and the nixie did not show herself again, the miller began to feel at ease.
The boy grew up to be a youth and was apprenticed to a huntsman. When he had learned everything, and had become an excellent huntsman, the lord of the village took him into his service.
In the village lived a beautiful and true-hearted maiden, who pleased the huntsman. And when his master perceived that, he gave him a little house. The two were married, lived peacefully and happily, and loved each other with all their hearts.
One day the huntsman was chasing a roe dear. And when the animal turned aside from the forest into t
he open country, he pursued it and at last shot it. He did not notice that he was now in the neighborhood of the dangerous mill-pond, and went, after he had disemboweled the roe dear, to the water, in order to wash his bloodstained hands.
Scarcely, however, had he dipped them in than the nixie ascended, smilingly wound her dripping arms around him, and drew him quickly down under the waves, which closed over him.
When it was evening, and the huntsman did not return home, his wife became alarmed. She went out to seek him, and as he had often told her that he had to be on his guard against the snares of the nixie, and dared not venture into the neighborhood of the mill-pond, she already suspected what had happened.
She hastened to the water, and when she found his hunting-pouch lying on the shore, she could no longer have any doubt of the misfortune.
Lamenting her sorrow, and wringing her hands, she called on her beloved by name, but in vain. She hurried across to the other side of the pond, and called him anew. She reviled the nixie with harsh words, but no answer greeted her. The surface of the water remained calm. Only the crescent moon stared steadily back at her.
The poor woman did not leave the pond. With hasty steps, she paced around and around it, without resting a moment—sometimes in silence, sometimes uttering a loud cry, sometimes sobbing softly.
At last her strength came to an end, she sank down to the ground and fell into a heavy sleep.
Presently a dream took possession of her. She was anxiously climbing upward between great masses of rock. Thorns and briars caught her feet, the rain beat in her face, and the wind tossed her long hair about. When she had reached the summit, quite a different sight presented itself to her. The sky was blue, the air soft, the ground sloped gently downward, and on a green meadow, gay with flowers of every color, stood a pretty cottage. She went up to it and opened the door. There sat an old woman with white hair, who beckoned to her kindly.
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