I woke up cold and frightened and close to tears. I had wet the bed.
Angry with myself, I stripped the sheets and took another shower. It was a couple of hours until dawn, but I didn’t want to court sleep again, not with that poor woman dead and the spectre of Gluckmann so fresh in my thoughts. There would be no refreshing slumber now.
So I dressed and made tea and I took it up to the flagpole, where a cannon the best part of a hundred years old had been left to rust away, a reminder and perhaps a warning of what had occurred on this island during the war. The Union Jack whipped and smacked under assault from the wind. The Cotterhams must have been up to perform the ceremony. I imagined Penny trying to coax a tune from the bugle, the family laughing together at whatever squeaks and squawks flew into the night.
There was no sign of any lone swimmer in the ocean.
The hot drink inside me, I felt much happier. Despite the terror of the dream and the unpleasantness of the previous evening I felt buoyed, optimistic even. I was on the mend and not feeling any deleterious side effects from my hours cycling, beyond a slight rash and a not unpleasurable ache on the tops of my thighs.
I went down to the kitchen to find that at some time in the night Alastair had packed away the family things and vacated their rooms. There were two letters on the kitchen table addressed to me. One was from him, thanking me for my help and wishing me well, the other was from Mr. Standish, hoping that the unfortunate incident had not put me off the island, and asking whether I would like to accompany him—weather permitting—on a kayaking expedition that afternoon.
VI
MADMAN’S WOUND • STRIKING TRANSIT AND AN UNEXPECTED HAZARD • THE BONE BOOK
To ensure I spent my energies best on the paddle rather than the pedal, Mr. Standish had arranged for a car to pick me up. Nigel, his son, took me on the brief drive to Murène Bay, a broad beach with a half-mile crescent of sand and a protective wall that Nigel told me had been built during the German Occupation. Mr. Standish (“Call me Trevor, please”) was waiting, looking very keen and professional in what I’m led to believe is called a shorty wetsuit. No such apparel for me, but then I wasn’t intending to go in the water, as he was.
I was given a life jacket and a paddle and shown to my boat, a handsome thing with a transparent base, to better enjoy any marine life we might espy.
“Very sturdy, very stable boats, these,” Trevor assured me. “Honestly, you could do an Irish jig in it and it would barely move. The only problem is that, as a result, it’s a bit of a bugger to steer, so you have to work hard to turn left or right.”
I told him not to worry. I had done quite a bit of canoeing in the Bristol Channel when younger (a lot younger), but I felt confident in a boat (especially when I’d checked my pocket to make sure the hag stone was safely accompanying me) and once we’d set off and I got the feel of the vessel beneath me, we started making good time heading around the coast to investigate the many caves that ate into the sides of the island.
We were lucky with the wind. Where it had been savage during the nights, now it barely registered, and what sun there was licked my bare arms and felt good on my face. Streams of silver fish darted beneath the boat and it was all I could do to keep my attention on the rocks to make sure I didn’t come a cropper and put a hole in a very expensive bit of kit.
“Over here!” called Trevor.
I dutifully paddled over to him and he showed me a deep crevice channelling into the cliff-face. “Madman’s Wound,” he yelled (the gravelly, rasping cry of the gannets gliding around us was near deafening). “So-called because for a period of about twenty years in the eighteenth century it actually sealed itself shut, healed itself, you might say—some weird realignment of the rocks, tectonic shifting, minor earth tremor, nobody knows for sure—until about seventy years ago, when it mysteriously reappeared.”
“Is it safe to go in?”
“Today, yes, I think so. Usually no, because of the swift tides around here and the choppy waters.”
“Shall we?”
“If you’re feeling intrepid enough, of course.”
And so it was that we braved the currents and the rocks to breach that horrible aperture in the cliff-face which looked—I hesitate to say it in case it should make me appear downright strange—vaguely sexual, and travelled through a claustrophobically narrow and low tunnel (having to duck our heads on numerous occasions) until we reached a broadening space that bounced the echoes of the lapping waves and our wondrous voices back at us, along with the eye-watering stench of bat guano.
I felt myself become rather faint—there was no obvious vent in the interior to allow the air in here to be recycled—and had to bring the boat to a stop alongside a low outcrop of rock in order to hold myself steady. To lose consciousness here, in near darkness, was to invite a swift drowning.
The shock of that thought helped revive me a little; but not as much as the inadvertent placing of my hand on something both horrible and yet strangely familiar. I thought I’d simply touched a pile of waste—more of that stinking ordure, most probably, or the body of a bat that had reached the end of its life and was settling into putrescence. But this possessed uniform shape, despite its revolting, organic yield beneath my fingers.
Before I knew what I was doing, I’d scooped up the queer artefact and hidden it beneath the seat of my boat. My heart was drumming—I felt as though I’d committed a crime. I heard Trevor yap on about the cave without taking any of it in, beyond the mention of it being rumoured to be a location for ceremonies involving pagans making sacrifices to the sea.
When his lecture had run its course, we navigated a route back out into open water and wearily paddled back to shore. I was tuckered out, but I felt good. Fresh sea air and honest exertion had repaired me, I believed.
“Look!” called Trevor. I followed the trajectory of his pointing finger and saw what at first glance looked like a lighthouse striped black and white on a promontory of rock fronting one of the smaller islands. But it was far too small and at the top, where there ought to have been a light, was more like a turret.
“Striking transit,” Trevor explained. “If you line that up with the white tower behind, so it’s blocked from sight, it means you’re in the vicinity of a hazard. Underwater rocks that will tear a hole in a ship like a witch’s claw through a pair of tights.”
We paddled carefully over to the area the striking transit was warning us about. “See?” Trevor yelled, his face intent on the transparent base of his boat. I stared down at the seemingly limitless green-grey sea and felt a twinge of vertigo at the thought of all that depth.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“You’ll see it in a minute, just keep drifting this way.”
I used the paddle as a rudder to steer closer to Trevor’s position, and flinched in shock as a cluster of sharp black jags of rocks appeared like thrusting fingers, inches away from the hull.
“Impressive, no?” As he made for shore, Trevor was grinning like a schoolboy who had found a rude magazine. I nodded and began to paddle to catch up with him. A glint of light caught my eye; no natural play of sunlight this… It was a soft, strangely greasy light coming from within the water—not a reflection, or a glint of scales on the silver flank of a mackerel.
I’d never seen its like before. It seemed to be some freak conglomeration of limbs and fins and, yes, mouths. A hideous collision of terrifying sea creatures, as if many different breeds had somehow managed to find a way to make the worst of their genes apparent in their offspring. It was devilish, unholy. Massive. And it was coming towards me.
It was finning its way around the treacherous columns of rock, moving much more swiftly than its awkward bulk should have allowed. The light came from odd, fleshy baskets arranged around and across its torso, similar to those I’d seen on Gluckmann in my dreams. Scraps of hairy skin—weird ‘lids’—flapped back and forth on top of them, allowing a view of what lay coiled inside: wet, dark things with grin
ning jaws that flashed in deep, layered triangles of silver. Shark mouths on human embryos—my nightmares given oxygen. I hadn’t been dreaming. I’d predicted this, or been channelled some hellish vision after meeting Gluckmann that night.
The speed of it.
It changed direction with the dizzying immediacy of a shoal of herring. I saw a strange mix of fin and hand rise up momentarily, splayed as a brake was applied to its progress, and it was like a pale starfish, webbed, peppered with tiny barnacles. It stared up at me with ancient, anemone-encrusted eyes, then at the thing I’d stolen from the cave, and I felt my knees began to shake uncontrollably with fear—they began spanking uncontrollably against the side of the kayak. What had I done?
Trevor was ahead of me now, so did not see me reach down to pick up my find. I thought my capacity for surprise had been blunted over the past few days, but here was another shock. I felt the wind belted from me as I beheld what could only be described as a book fashioned from the sea—its covers a melange of fish-skin, scales, fins and needle-bones. An eye stared lifeless, opaque, from one corner. The whole had been varnished with some kind of foul-smelling lacquer; it shone like the creamy, nacreous innards of an oyster shell.
I turned the ‘pages’ and a rotten nam pla odour assaulted me like slaps across the face. Mashed, dried fish, teeth and tentacles. Crushed octopus beaks. Frills and gills and suckers. No words. I felt each page as if there might be some braille-like sense to be gleaned from them, but I received nothing for my labour but the stomach-turning reek of decay and the jab of spines into my skin.
How long had it been there in the oily shadows of the cave?
The creature beneath the surface had changed its posture. It had assumed some sort of attitude of attack—everything sharp on its body curved towards me. I tossed the ‘book’ into the surf and wiped my hands against my jacket. Just some oddity created by a personage with too much time on their hands and an unhealthy relationship with things best left below the surface of the sea.
Nevertheless, the creature was besotted by it: I watched it follow the book as it sank to the shadows. The only thing to suggest any kind of living being had been within my vicinity was a stream of silver bubbles torrenting up from the deep.
Back at shore Trevor helped me drag the boat on to the sand.
“Are you okay, old chap?” he asked.
I nodded, incapable of speech. If I’d tried to say anything, I would have been violently sick. Eventually I was able to thank Trevor for allowing me to accompany him on his adventure (though I wanted to do anything but), blaming my pallor on my age. I’d been overdoing it, despite my overall feelings of good health. He drove me back to Fort Requin and I was horrified to see the sea lapping at the causeway, the beach where I had walked and unearthed the hag stone now covered completely by water.
“High tides,” he explained, unnecessarily. “But you’ll be quite all right inside those thick walls. The sea will have retreated by morning.”
He drove expertly through the surf, knowing instinctively where the road was, though I could see nothing beneath that shifting, hungry body. He dropped me off and waved goodbye, and I watched him churn through the water back to St. Anne.
Darkness was coming on and I suddenly felt very alone, and utterly certain that I wanted to leave. I should have asked him to take me to the airport. At the very least I might have asked him to stay with me that night, to provide company and beggar the fact he’d have thought me a nervous ninny.
I locked and bolted the gate, ditto the door to the kitchen. I was determined to spend the night in there rather than the chilly Soldiers’ Quarters with its unfettered vista of the ocean. I’d had quite a bellyful of the sea. I was looking forward to getting back to the dry, landlocked interior of Leicestershire.
I made myself a cup of tea and carried it to the sofa, where I made a den from the blankets and pillows from the bed Ralph had vacated (I found one of his comics that had fallen down the side; it upset me disproportionately). A long, sound sleep and then in the morning I would see about making preparations for my departure. Trevor Standish could have no qualms about reimbursement—my convalescence was predicated upon calm and rest. I’d encountered neither. I’m sure he would not like to have a heart attack as well as a murdered guest on his hands.
I turned out the light and wriggled down into my shelter—the sofa was long and deep. Rain rattled briefly at the windowpanes like the nails of someone demanding entry. I willed sleep to come. I did not want another night of anxiety. Usually, when I wanted slumber to envelop me, I thought of water. I imagined myself as a smooth, dark pebble thrown into deep water. By the time I hit the ground I would be snoozing contentedly.
Water, though, was the thing I least wanted to think about. I didn’t like what it concealed here. I didn’t appreciate the way it had erased the concourse and trapped me in this cold, forbidding place. They could dress it up as much as they liked—pretty curtains, fancy soaps in the dish by the bath—it was still a place where soldiers had marched, with their guns and their knives and grenades, death on their minds.
At least, I comforted myself, I was in a place that had been designed to be well-nigh impregnable. The walls in parts of this structure were almost twenty feet thick. Do your worst, Mr. Gluckmann, I thought. Do your damnedest.
VII
THE OUTPOST (II) • THE EYE OF THE STONE
“The hag stone, it finds you. You do not find it.”
I felt my neck snap as I jerked upright at the deep, clotted voice. Mr. Gluckmann was standing knee-deep in the surf, his baskets hanging glutinously around his hips like oilcloth canteens. What hair remained on his head hung limp and grey. His mouth was much wider than I had initially thought, the corners slack and encrusted with dried salt. His lips glistened, pursing obscenely. It was a mouth that looked like something big and meaty you might unlock from the seized shell of a bivalve.
His eyes, round and black, were fast upon my pocket. I felt the stone within cold against my thigh, as if it were the intensity of his gaze that was reducing its temperature.
“You know,” he said, “there are a lot of fishermen around here who invest great stock in the idea of holy stones protecting their boats? They tie them to nails hammered into the bows, near the gunwale. It is believed these stones ward off the approach of witches, or witch-directed spirits. Those that decide not to tie a stone to their vessel, or do not position it carefully, might not land as many fish. If they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky? Well, there are a lot of wrecks in these waters. A lot of unrecovered fishermen swaying in time to those deep ocean currents.”
Something flopped over the lip of one of the baskets. Long, spiny feelers, or, God forbid, fingers. As far removed from human as you could pray for. They clacked together, stiff but with some yield to them, and they were wet with some kind of slime, like the thick, bubbled spit worked up within the maws of crabs or lobsters. Mr. Gluckmann slapped at them with his hand and they retreated.
“How is your house-hunting going?” I asked. All of the baskets were rattling now—I saw movement within each one. Some were being stretched as whatever squirmed inside extended itself. The membrane thinned, whitening as claw or pincer or tooth became embossed against it.
Mr. Gluckmann rubbed at his cheek and the layers of flab there shivered. I wouldn’t have been surprised, had he teased them open, to see a set of gills arranged across the flesh. “We walk among you now,” he said. “It has been so long.”
Behind him the sea began to boil. I forced myself to look away, certain that my meagre faculties would not be able to cope with the sight of the thing—beyond massive—that could cause such a churning. I pulled the stone from my pocket and Mr. Gluckmann began to jangle and jerk like a marionette. Those baskets—those wombs—which I now saw were not merely looped over and around his body, but attached to Gluckmann’s skin, were swelling by the minute. Soon they would not be able to contain their inhabitants.
A shadow fell across the world, and th
e odour of something unimaginably old hit me like a wall. I felt the coil and slither of gigantic tentacles test my limbs from all angles. And slowly, inexorably, I was drawn towards the sea. At my back I felt the heat of jaws I refused to countenance.
The last thing I saw was Mr. Gluckmann carrying his crowning babies as he waddled towards the town and its unsuspecting population. “You are no threat to us,” he said, “damned as you are by the cage of your own mortality.”
* * *
Somehow I had become tangled in the blankets and sheets that formed my temporary bed. I was hot and sweaty, the stone in my hand threatening to slip from my grasp. It took a moment to orient myself, but in the end I was just glad to be anywhere other than in the grip of some terrible, benthic creature eager on adding me to the contents of its belly.
What a nightmare. The most horrible, the most vivid I have ever encountered in my three score years and ten.
What was worse was that only two hours had gone by since deciding to go to bed. Muscles aching, but sleep now as likely as Clarissa’s return, I padded to the kitchen and set about making myself a mug of hot milk.
The weather remained squally—spits of rain (or maybe even fragments of shingle and surf tossed up by the tantrum winds) clattered against the windows. I shrugged on my coat and, hot drink in hand, unbolted the door.
It was piercingly cold; within seconds my milk had been cooled to a drinkable temperature.
We walk among you now.
I shuddered. What was that dream all about? Some weird idea, fuelled by too much red wine and seafood, of a world being gradually overtaken by an army of amphibious Mr. Gluckmanns? Utterly preposterous, yet I felt vaguely proud of the breadth of my imagination. Surely my ongoing fear of dementia was a long way off yet.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 18
