Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

by Stephen Jones

  It was the next morning, and he had been trying to find someone local to interview. He wanted the talent to do some empathy work, get Plumb to listen sympathetically and nod as some teary bumpkin showed them their drenched possessions and talked about how their pictures of Granny were lost forever, but there wasn’t anyone.

  “They won’t talk to you?” asked Kapenda.

  “They’ve all fucking vanished!” said Needham. “There’s no one in the emergency shelters, no one worth mentioning anyway, and they certainly aren’t staying at any of the farms, I’ve checked. Most of them have been abandoned too. The police aren’t sure when anyone’s gone, or they’re not saying if they know.”

  “They must be somewhere,” said Kapenda.

  “Must they? Well I don’t know where to fucking find them,” said Needham.

  “Perhaps they all swam away?” said Plumb and laughed. Neither Kapenda nor Needham joined in.

  “It’ll be dead cows and flooded fucking bushes again, you’ll see,” said Needham, disconsolate. “Isaac, can’t you find me something new?”

  “I’ll try,” said Kapenda.

  * * *

  David was standing in the water in one of the fields a little further out from Grovehill. Kapenda saw his bike first, leaning against the hedge and half underwater, and pulled the jeep over to see what the man was doing. There was a stile in the hedge and David was beyond it, out into the field proper. Kapenda waded to the wooden gate and climbed it, perching on the top and calling, “Hello!”

  “‘For Behold’,” said David loudly, his voice rolling across the water, “‘I will bring a flood of water upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under Heaven.’ Hello, Isaac. They knew, you see—they understood.”

  “Who knew? Understood what?”

  “We have always waited for the water’s call, those of us with the blood, waited for the changes to come, but now? Some of us have called to it, and it has come.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Kapenda. He wished he had brought his camera—David looked both lonely and somehow potent, standing up to his chest in the water, his back to Kapenda. It was raining again, the day around them grey and murky.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It has been brought this far but I worry,” said David, his voice lower, harder for Kapenda to hear. “How much further? How much more do we want? And what of what comes after us? The sleeping one whose symbol you found, Isaac? It wants the world, drowned and washed clean, but clean of what? Just of you? Or of everything—of us as well? We should have stayed in the deeps, but no, we have moved into the shallows and we prepare the way as though we were cleaning the feet of the sleeping one, supplicants to it. We might be terrible, Isaac, but after us? Do you have a god? Pray for its mercy, for the thing that comes after us—the thing that we open the way for—will be awful and savage beyond imagining.”

  “David, what are you talking about?”

  “The water, Isaac. It’s always about the water.” David turned—in the fractured, mazy light, his face was a white shift of moonlike intensity. His eyes were swollen, turning so that they appeared to be looking to opposite sides of his head. His skin looked like old linen, rough and covered in dry and flaking patches. He seemed to have lost his hair and his neck had folded down over itself in thick, quivering ridges. “It would be best for you to leave, Isaac. You have been saved from the water once, but I suspect that once is all.”

  “David, please, I still don’t know what you mean. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “I thought we had time, that the calling that cannot be ignored would never come, but it is too late. Others have hastened it, and the water calls to us even as they call to it. I can’t stand against it, Isaac. The change is come.”

  “David—” Kapenda began, but the older man turned and began to move off across the field, bobbing down shoulder-deep into the water with each long stride, sweeping his arms around as though swimming.

  “David!” Kapenda shouted, but the man didn’t turn. Just before he was lost to view, the water around him seemed suddenly full of movement, with things rising to the surface and looking back at him. Kapenda, scared, turned away and returned to the jeep.

  * * *

  “I’ve found us a boat!” said Needham when Kapenda got back. He didn’t seem bothered that Kapenda hadn’t found anything new to film.

  “Your idea about the fields yesterday, about how smooth they are, it got me thinking,” Needham continued. “Now the flow’s slowing down, it’s safe to go out in a boat, not in the fields but around the houses. They got film of the barns yesterday, didn’t they? Well, we’ll go one better, we’ll get film of the houses, of Grovehill!”

  Plumb was already in the boat, bobbing gently at the edge of the flood. It was a small dinghy with barely enough room for the three of them. Kapenda had to keep the camera on his shoulder as Needham steered the boat using the outboard on its back. Why had he come? Kapenda wondered.

  Because, he knew, this was where he belonged, recording. Whatever David had meant, whatever this flood and the ones that had come before it were, someone had to catch them, pin them to history. Here, in this drowned and drowning world, he had to be the eyes of everyone who came after him.

  Needham piloted the boat away from the centre of Grovehill, down winding lanes among houses that were underwater to their eaves. They went slowly—here and there, cars floated past them, and the tops of signs and traffic lights emerged from the flood like the stems of water plants. Kapenda filmed a few short sequences as they drifted, with Plumb making up meaningless but portentous-sounding phrases. Mostly, the imagery did the talking. At one point, they docked against a road emerging from the water that rose up to a hill upon which a cluster of houses sat, relatively safe. Kapenda focused in, hoping for footage of their occupants, but no one moved. Had they been evacuated already?

  Several minutes later, they found themselves drifting over a playing field, the ghostly lines of football pitches just visible through the still, surprisingly clear water. While Plumb and Needham argued a script point, Kapenda had an idea—he fixed the water-cover to the lens of the camera and then held it over the side of the boat and into the water. The surprising clarity would hopefully allow him to obtain good images of the submerged world, eerie and silent. Leaning back and getting as comfortable as he could, Kapenda held the camera so that it filmed what was below while he listened as the talent and the director argued.

  “Hey!” a voice called, perhaps twenty minutes later. It was distorted, the voice, coming from a loudhailer. Kapenda looked up. Bouncing across the surface towards them was one of the rescue boats, a policeman in its bow waving at them.

  “Oh fuck,” said Needham.

  “What?” asked Plumb.

  “I didn’t actually ask permission to come out here,” said Needham.

  “Shit!” said Plumb. “We’ll be fucking arrested!”

  “We won’t. Isaac, have you got enough footage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we play innocent. Plumb, charm them if you can.”

  “You have to go back!” the policeman called. Needham raised an arm at him and as the launch pulled alongside them, the talent began to do his stuff.

  * * *

  By the time they sorted out the police, with many mea culpas from Needham and much oleaginous smiling from Plumb, it was late. The water had continued to rise, its surface now only a few feet down the hill from the pub’s door. Plumb made a joke about being able to use the boat to get back to it, but it was almost true and none of them laughed.

  Inside, most of the crews were quiet and there was little of the talking and boasting and arguing that Kapenda would have expected. There were less of them as well; some had already left, retreating north to the dry or hunting for other stories. In Middlesbrough and Cumbria, rivers were bursting their banks and Kapenda watched footage on the news of flooded farmland and towns losing their footing to water. In one trackin
g shot, he was sure he saw something behind the local talent, a tiny figure hanging in a tree, spinning lazily on a chain as the water rose to meet it.

  Back in his room, Kapenda started to view the film he had taken that day. The first shots were good, nice framings of Plumb in the prow of their dinghy with Grovehill, drowned, over his shoulder. He edited the shots together and then sent them to Needham, who would work on voiceovers with Plumb.

  Then he came to the underwater footage.

  They were good shots, the focus correct and imagery startling. The water was clear but full of debris—paper and clothing and unidentifiable things floated past the lens as it passed over cars still parked in driveways, gardens in which plants waved, houses around which fishes swam. At one point the corpse of a cow bounced languidly along the centre of a street, lifting and falling as the gentle current carried it on. The dead animal’s eyes were gone, leaving torn holes where they used to be, and one of its legs ended in a ragged stump. It remained in the centre of the shot for several minutes, keeping pace with the boat above, and then it was gone as they shifted direction. Kapenda’s last view of it was its hind legs, trailing behind as it jolted slowly out of sight.

  They were in a garden.

  At first, he thought it was a joke. Someone had set four figures around a picnic table, seated in plastic chairs, some kind of weird garden ornamentation, and then one of the figures moved and Kapenda realised that, whatever they were, they were real.

  Three were dark, the fourth paler, all squat and fat and bald. One of them held a hunk of grey meat in its hand, was taking bites from it with a mouth that was wide and lipless. Their eyes, as far as Kapenda could tell, were entirely black, bulging from the side of their heads. All four were scaly, their backs ridged. As Kapenda watched, one of the figures reached out and caught something floating past and its hand was webbed, the fingers thick and ending in savage, curved claws.

  As the figures moved off the side of the screen, the palest looked up. Thick folds of skin in its neck rippled, gill-slits opening and closing. Its mouth was wide, open to reveal gums that were bleeding, raw from tiny, newly-emerging triangular teeth. It nodded, as though in greeting, and raised a webbed hand to the camera.

  One of its eyes was a dead, milky white.

  Kapenda turned off the camera and went to stand by the window. He took the little figure from his pocket, turning it, feeling its depth-worn smoothness as the chain moved through his fingers.

  He watched as figures swam through the ever-advancing water below him, never quite breaking the surface, forming intricate patterns of ripple and wave. Rice had called the thing from the hedge an idol. Was it simple peasant magic? No, this was nothing simple, nothing innocent. The idol looked nothing like the figures in the flood, was something harsh and alien. What had David said? That it was the thing that came after?

  What was coming?

  The rain fell, and the water rose to eat the Earth.

  RISING, NOT DREAMING

  by ANGELA SLATTER

  “PLAY,” THEY SAID, and I did, plucking at a harp made of bone and sinew.

  “Sing,” they said, and I did, weaving words with water and making my listeners weep. I drew from their depths, from souls no one suspected, the dreams that might make them slumber. I surrounded them with lullabies to send gods to sleep, to keep them below and render them harmless to all that breathed above.

  Too many had been the ages of pain and death, too long had the Great Old Ones reigned. Enough, said my masters, enough. Too long had the dreams of men been troubled with the ructions of the star lords. Too often did they rise at whim from their undersea city, their R’lyeth, to walk the earth and bring darkness with them.

  They wondered, my masters, how to keep the beasts beneath the waves. They thought music perhaps would lull them, that in the magic of sound there might somehow be salvation. But who to play—who could play—such a tune? A competition was held to judge the best musician, the most enthralling player, the finest singer-seducer. They promised immortality, my masters, that no one would forget the winner’s playing—for that one there would always be an audience. They gambled, quite correctly, upon an artist’s pride and arrogance.

  And I won. Gods help me, I won. I was tasked to sit upon a high mountain by the sea, to play there and let the waves of my music swell and flow, to crash against the walking monstrosities, to enchant them, to lead them like stupid children into the deep, back to their sunken city.

  The spells my masters had set around me meant I would not, could not drown, that the water would be to me as the air had been. That my life would not wear out, that I would forever keep them under my thrall, my hideous listeners, eternally asleep. I did not pay attention, though, not carefully enough. Only once I’d been trapped did I replay the words in my head and realise what I’d agreed to do.

  Eternally asleep as long as I continued to play.

  I think of the wife I had, sweet and tender.

  I think of her belly swelling, rich and round.

  I think of how I told her it would be all right. That I would return, my masters would reward me and we would never want for anything ever again.

  I thought, my pride blinding me, I need only sing them to sleep. But when the last notes of my song died away, I watched the great things stir and begin to wake. And I could not bear the thought that they would walk once more, that my wife might be endangered, that our child might be cast upon an altar for the satiation of beings that had come from dark stars.

  And so I played again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Forever again.

  But lately, I am tired. I have been too long beneath the storm-tossed waves. Centuries, aeons passing while I go on in an extended state of decay, neither living nor dying. I know not if I am a thing that remembers itself a man, or a man who thinks himself a thing.

  My wife long ago was bones and dust, carried along the river of time.

  My masters likewise have turned to ash.

  What care I for a world I no longer know?

  What care I for anyone else when all I wish for is the balm of sleep? The balm I have given to these things for so very many years?

  My fingers slow upon the strings and my song stops.

  “Awake!” I say, and they do.

  I watch them turn and roll, sloughing off their slumber like giants, like continents rising out of the sea with the steam and stink of Earth-birth hazing their grey-green skin. The water around us boils as if a volcano had grown.

  Limbs like monumental trees shift, torsos like cliff-faces heave, visages bereft of benign intent turn themselves upward so they might find the underside of the sea’s surface and know which way to go. They uncoil their bodies, stretch towards the sky and the air, think and seek to break the hold the waves have upon them and to reach once more into the dreams of men.

  “Rise,” I say, and they do. Released from sleep they believe it a time when they might reclaim all that had been theirs.

  Their largest, their lord, their priestly god ascends first, speeds upwards fastest to break free. The strokes of his great arms cause tidal waves; the bubbles from his newly filled lungs, his once-forgotten breath, move big as buildings. Dead Cthulhu rises from his house in R’lyeth, his dreaming done and his waking mind focused upon an end, a finish, a catastrophe. Around me, his kin, his followers hum a tune of destruction, one that sounds so like my song that I feel a’sudden the keen dagger of my betrayal.

  I think of what I have done. Of the promise I have broken, the covenant I have dishonoured. I think of the disappointment on my wife’s face should her shade discover my treachery. And I weep though my tears mix with the sea and no one but I would know of my remorse. I feel my own sleep creep upon me; a death and a forgetting, so close, so sweet.

  And I fight it.

  I put my hands once more to the sinuous strings of my harp and strum a tune to draw them back, these monstrous mountains, these Great Old Ones who could bring only ru
in to whatever roams above, whatever takes wing in the skies. All would fall beneath the merciless behemoth feet.

  My voice catches all of them. Most of them. All but one. The others still close enough to be caught upon the sweet hook of my song, the enchanting notes of my harp, settle once more. They go back to their dead, drowned houses, open the doors of heavy stone and retire.

  But the greatest, the first amongst them, him I did not snare.

  Cthulhu in rising, not dreaming, escapes the bonds of slumber.

  Cthulhu rose and I know not where he resides or what destruction he causes. But I remember his terrible eyes as he swam upwards, as he gave me a single contemptuous glance and knew what I had done, both to him and his, and to my own kind. He judged me a hollow water-logged thing, a thing that remembers itself a man, barely worthy of a glance.

  And it is that look, that longest, shortest of looks that keeps me playing, praying that my notes will linger forever.

  THE LONG LAST NIGHT

  by BRIAN LUMLEY

  I HAD MET or bumped into the old man on what was probably the very rim of the Bgg’ha Zone. And after careful, nervous greetings (he had a gun and I didn’t) and while we shared one of my cigarettes, he asked me: “Do you know why it’s called that?”

  He meant the Bgg’ha Zone, of course, because he had already mentioned how we should be extremely careful just being there. Shrugging by way of a partial answer, I then offered: “Because it’s near the centre of it?”

  “Well,” he replied, “I suppose that defines it now. I mean, that’s likely how most people think of it; because after a number of years a name tends to stick, no matter its actual origin. And let’s face it, there’s not too many of us around these days—folks who were here at the time—people like myself, who are still here to remember what happened.”

  “When the Bgg’ha Zone got its name, you mean?” I prompted him. “There’s a reason it’s called that? So what happened?”

  Getting his thoughts together, he nodded and said, “The real reason is that shortly after that damn Twisted Tower was raised when They first got here, after they came down from the stars and up from the sea, or wherever, the only time anyone went anywhere near the Twisted Tower voluntarily—‘to find out what it was like’ I’ve heard it said, if you can credit someone would do such a thing!—the damn fool came out again a ragged, shrieking lunatic who couldn’t do anything but scream a few mad words over and over again. ‘The Bgg’ha Zone!’ he would scream, laughing and skittering around and pointing at that mile-high monstrosity where it stands dead-centre of things. And: ‘The Twisted Tower!’ he would yelp like a dog. But he was harmless except to himself, and making those noises and a mess was all he did until they bound and gagged him to keep him quiet. Then his heart gave out and he died with a wet gag in his mouth and the froth of madness drying on his chin…”