by Khurt Khave
Kelda Crich is a newborn entity. She's been lurking in her creator's mind for a few years. Now she's out in the open. Find Kelda in London looking at strange things in London's medical museums or on her blog. Kelda's work has appeared in The Lovecraft eZine, Journal of Unlikely Acceptances, Dreams from the Witch House and in the Bram Stoker Award winning After Death anthology.
Saturday Night at the Esoteric Order of Dagon Jill Hand
Something hit the other side of the wall with a thump, causing the coffee mugs on the white laminate shelves from Ikea to clatter.
“What the hell can they be doing over there?” Aubs asked. She went over to the wall, fist raised, ready to pound on it to signal them to quiet down.
“Don’t,” I said, alarmed. “It might make them mad.”
From the other side of the wall we could hear the faint piping of some kind of wind instrument, the same four notes played monotonously over and over. Then came the sound of male voices chanting what sounded like ja, ja something-or-other. Was that German? Were the weird guys on the other side of the wall some kind of neo-Nazis?
For the hundredth time I asked Aubs what she thought EOD stood for. Those were the letters painted in black and gold on the pediment of the pillared building next door, the building that shared a wall with our coffee shop. For the hundredth time she said she had no idea.
Emissaries of Doom? Extremely Obnoxious Ducks? Eat Our Donuts? We couldn’t guess and the people of the depressing seaside town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, weren’t telling.
It was apparently some kind of club, a secret society like the Masons. The men who gathered there met on Saturday nights (We thought they were exclusively men, although they wore hooded gray robes with the hoods pulled up so we couldn’t be certain). We’d see them drifting down the street in silent twos and threes. An ancient black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, its windows tinted to an impenetrable darkness like those of a car belonging to a Mafia don, would pull up in front and disgorge a tiny, hunched-over someone enveloped in a hooded robe who was apparently too frail to walk unaided. A couple of robed figures would come out of the building and half-carry whoever it was inside.
Aubs, standing beside me at the front window, would say, “There goes the patriarchy. At it again.”
“Maybe it’s like Bohemian Grove,” I suggested. “You know, that males-only place in California where billionaires go to make deals and tell the government what to do and where they run around stark naked.”
We pondered the thought of the men next door running around naked. It seemed unlikely that a group of slow-moving, laconic New Englanders would get up to those sorts of hijinks, but you never knew.
The building next door, with its sagging gambrel roof, its clapboard siding in dire need of paint, inexpertly boarded-over windows from which glimpses of faint, flickering light could occasionally be seen, was typical of Innsmouth. Three-quarters of the town was deserted and the rest was populated by people who didn’t seem to care about how either they or their property looked. And they certainly didn’t welcome outsiders.
You’d see them shuffling through the streets, hair unkempt, moving like zombies with hangovers, or sitting motionless on the crumbling stone breakwater gazing out to sea. Fishing was the only thing that seemed to perk them up. The people of Innsmouth loved to fish, and judging by the boats laden with fish and lobsters that returned in the afternoons, chugging past Devil Reef into the harbor, they were good at it.
The whole town smelled of fish; a nauseating, brackish, dirty aquarium smell that got into our clothes and our hair, no matter how often we showered and sprayed air freshener. I like the bracing scent of salt air, but Innsmouth just smelled bad.
We had Aubs’ mother to thank for our coming to Innsmouth. She inherited the building on New Church Green from her late husband, Aubs’ stepfather, a man named Hugh Gilman. Hugh’s family had lived in Innsmouth for generations before his parents pulled up stakes and moved to Omaha, taking Hugh, who was then just a little boy, with them. “They didn’t like the ocean. That’s all Hugh would ever say about why they left,” Aubs’ mother told us.
Aubs’ mother, Shirley, thought it would be a good place for Aubs and me to open the coffee shop we’d been talking about. She signed the deed to the property over to us for the token fee of one dollar.
“It’s on the coast,” she told us. “It’s probably like Provincetown: a popular spot for tourists.” She added, happily, “I read that Provincetown is very popular with gays. Your coffee shop could become sort of a gay haven.”
Shirley was a dear lady. She supported Aubs’ and my relationship, sometimes a little clumsily, but always with good intentions. I didn’t laugh out loud at the thought of us running a gay haven, although I wanted to. Instead I thanked her for her generosity. It seemed our plans for owning our own business were falling neatly into place. The realtor in Newburyport who managed the property told us the previous tenant, a luncheonette, had closed down, leaving the place in serious need of a good cleaning but otherwise serviceable. I accepted a job in Ipswich as a graphic designer so we’d have a steady source of income. Then we packed our things into a U-Haul, said goodbye to Omaha, and headed east.
The reality of Innsmouth failed to match Shirley’s rosy vision of it as an upscale vacation spot. You’d think architects and historians would be in raptures over the square, red brick Georgian houses with slate roofs and fanlights over the front doors, but for some reason they hadn’t been meticulously restored, being run as antique shops and day spas and bed and breakfasts. On the contrary, most of them were falling into ruin, with broken windows through which glimpses of stained and mildewed plaster walls could be seen, curling strips of wallpaper hanging like dead skin sloughed from a snake.
At least half the houses were vacant, or appeared to be. In some cases they gave the creepy sensation of being occupied by unseen watchers whose eyes followed our every move as we arrived in town, driving down Paine Street to the Gilman House, Innsmouth’s sole hotel.
It was a tall, cupolaed building badly in need of a fresh coat of yellow paint. The lobby contained a couple of dead potted palms, dry and brown in their pots, and leather armchairs that might have been new when Teddy Roosevelt was in office. It smelled of dust and stale cigarette smoke and the omnipresent odor of fish. It might have helped if there was a cheery fire burning in the fireplace, but as it was, the ambiance was distinctly unwelcoming. We would have gone somewhere else, but we’d been on the road for hours and were too tired to drive to Ipswich or Arkham and look for someplace better.
There was no one behind the front desk. I walked across the threadbare red and blue Oriental rug that looked like it might once have been a good one – around the time William McKinley was president – and gave the brass service bell a couple of taps.
Nothing happened. I silently counted to ten and gave the bell a more decisive tap. From a back room came the sound of twanging springs as someone rose from a chair. A slope-shouldered man emerged from the doorway. He didn’t seem all that old but he didn’t look healthy. He was balding, a wispy blond goatee straggling from his chin. His bulging eyes were blue and watery and his scrawny neck had deep creases on either side. Something’s not right with him, I thought. Some kind of congenital birth defect?
“Yes?” he said, staring at us unblinkingly. We told him we wanted a room. Were there any available?
“Only about thirty,” he said with a barking laugh. “You want the Presidential Suite or the Honeymoon Suite?”
“Which is nicer?” I asked, thinking we’d splurge and treat ourselves to a romantic suite.
“They’re both horrible. A guy hanged himself in the Presidential Suite last week and the Honeymoon Suite is full of wasps.” His thick lips stretched in a mirthless smile and his unblinking eyes stared as he waited to gauge our reaction.
I thought I knew what this was. It was the famous New England sense of humor that I’d heard so much about. They love to try and frighten tourists with tall tales and ou
tlandish stories. There could also be a bit of racism and homophobia mixed in, due to the fact that we were a brown-skinned woman and a white woman who were clearly a couple from the way we stood holding hands, our shoulders touching.
Aubs said we wanted something free of stinging insects and recent suicides. That got us a narrow room on the second floor that had a double bed primly covered with a pink chenille spread, under which lurked a sagging trough of a mattress. It overlooked a courtyard paved with bricks laid in a herringbone pattern. The bricks were overgrown with dark green moss that had a slimy appearance, as if the footsteps of anyone walking on them would make nasty squishing sounds. Like the cobblestone streets and the cracked slate sidewalks through which weeds sprouted, the courtyard would have been quaint if it wasn’t so neglected.
Gentrification had yet to come to Innsmouth as it had to places like Red Hook in Brooklyn, once a crime-ridden hellhole and now a pricey locale of loft apartments and twee little shops catering to hipsters. At that point, looking down into the moss-grown courtyard, I thought Aubs and I had gotten into something good by coming to Innsmouth before the real estate investors and the trust fund brats discovered it. Little did we suspect what was going to happen. If we had we would have scooted on out of there and headed back to Omaha as if our hair was on fire.
“Look at this!” Aubs called from the bathroom. I went in and found her studying something on the wall next to the rusting chrome towel rack. The rack held two thin grey bath towels that might once have been white, back when Bill Clinton was in office. “What’s up with this?”
It was a little drawing made in black marker of something with tentacles and staring eyes that vaguely resembled an octopus or a squid, if said octopus or squid also possessed a pair of arms and hands with claws at the end. At first I thought a child had done it, but there was something about the expression in those big, staring eyes, a coldly assessing kind of malevolence, that wasn’t remotely childlike. Underneath was printed, in neat block letters: WORSHIP MOTHER HYDRA!!!
“Mysterious and spooky,” I said, quoting the lyrics to The Addams Family. The whole town was like something from the fevered imagination of Charles Addams, we decided later. All those falling-down old mansions with their mansard roofs and widow’s walks, their windows broken, weeds entwined in rust-eaten wrought iron fences enclosing what must once have been well-tended green lawns. There could have been any number of ghosts and monsters inside those houses.
The desk clerk had given Aubs the once-over when she presented her credit card to pay for the room. “Aubrey Gilman,” he said, slowly, reading the name printed on the card. He raised his watery, bulging eyes. “You don’t look like a Gilman.”
She shrugged. She didn’t want to go into how Gilman was her stepfather’s name, and how he adopted her when she was eight, when he and her mother got married. She told him she was the new owner of 454 New Church Green, where we planned to open a coffee shop. That caused him to gape at us in consternation. It was as if she’d said that we planned on running a safari park, and would he mind keeping some lions in a few of his empty room until we built them an enclosure?
“Coffee shop? We don’t need any coffee shops. We make our own coffee.” He shook his head, disgusted. “I never heard the like! Coffee shop! This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard, where they lollygag around in coffee shops. This is Innsmouth. We fish. We make our own coffee.”
This is Innsmouth! I thought, crazily, thinking of King Leonidas in the film 300, screaming “This is Sparta!” at the Persian messenger before kicking him down a well.
“So,” said Aubs, after an uneasy pause, “do you own this hotel?”
He said he didn’t. Someone named Orrin Gilman owned it. “He’s indisposed. I run it for him. I’m a Marsh, Thaddeus Marsh.”
He pronounced it “Mosh,” as in mosh pit. He said it with the same kind of hauteur as if he’d announced that his surname was Rockefeller. He didn’t offer to shake hands, for which I was grateful. His hands were unusually broad, with scaly skin and stubby fingers that I saw, with mixed revulsion and pity, were webbed. Poor guy, I thought.
We left the Gilman House after staying three nights, relieved to be out of there and into the rooms above our new property. The little four-room apartment had worn linoleum floors and a kitchen that dated to around the time Sputnik was launched, but at least it was quiet. Gilman House, for all its seeming emptiness, was a noisy place at night. We’d hear croaking voices echoing up the stairwell from the lobby and the sounds of stealthy footsteps in the hall outside our room. On the third night, horribly, someone tried the doorknob. I was sound asleep when I heard Aubs whisper, “Lakshmi! Wake up!”
Usually she calls me Lee. I’m only Lakshmi, the name my parents gave me, when she’s angry or frightened. This time, she was frightened.
“What?” I said, sleepily. Aubs was sitting up in bed, staring at the doorknob outlined in a shaft of moonlight. I saw it turn slightly.
“Who’s there?” I shouted, jolted wide awake. “Aubs, get the gun! It’s an intruder!”
There was no gun. I hoped whoever it was didn’t know that.
“I have a gun. It’s loaded. Here I come!” I declared, swinging my legs out of bed and sounding about a hundred times braver than I felt. I threw open the door, my heart beating wildly. The hallway was deserted. I thought I heard someone running swiftly down the stairs, but decided not to pursue whoever it was. Maybe they got the wrong room. It was 2:15 a.m. We waited to see if anything else happened but nothing did. I jammed a chair under the doorknob and got back into bed, but I didn’t sleep and I don’t think Aubs did either.
The next day we moved into the apartment and started getting the ground floor ready for the grand opening of Bean Me Up, the name we’d arrived on after I rejected Java The Hutt (Aub’s suggestion, she was a Star Wars geek) and Mugshots, which I liked but Aubs didn’t.
“If we call it Mugshots, we’d have to wear fedoras and talk out of the sides of our mouths, like actors in an old gangster movie. I don’t think I’m up for that,” she said.
It appeared Thaddeus Marsh, that shining beacon of hospitality, was correct in saying that the townspeople preferred to make their own coffee. They gathered on the sidewalk and looked in the front window at us as we worked. We waved and beckoned them to come in, but they just gaped at us, open-mouthed, from behind the glass. They were like fish gazing out of an aquarium, nonplussed by the indecipherable activities of the funny, airbreathing creatures in the world outside their tank.
Fortunately, we had other customers. The employees at the Key Bank branch on Main Street came in, as did the people who worked at the True Value hardware and the Grabbit ‘N Go convenience store on Water Street. There was a McDonald’s and an Olive Garden and a Chrysler dealership on the Rowley Road, and some of their employees patronized us. None of these people were Innsmouth natives. Every one of them, when they got to talking, expressed a deep dislike for the town.
“The people are creepy, the way they stare at you and smirk, as if they know something you don’t know,” a woman who worked at the bank told us. “I’m thinking of putting in for a transfer to the Arkham branch when they get an opening. Or my sister says she might be able to find me something over at the university.”
“That’s Miskatonic?” Aubs asked her.
The woman nodded her head. “My sister works in the rare books room at the Orne Library. She says they’ve got an amazing collection.”
I had my job in Ipswich, so I wasn’t there as often as Aubs was, but I was there the day Donny Allen came in. He shuffled through the front door, making the brass sleigh bells that hung on a red leather strap give a cheerful jingle. Donny looked anything but cheerful. His brows were drawn down and his bearded face wore a sullen frown. He wore the usual costume of the Innsmouth native: ancient, oil-stained blue jeans, scuffed work boots and red and black buffalo plaid lumberman jacket, but he looked different from the usual Innsmouth people. He was broader across the shoulders and didn’t
have the watery blue pop eyes and the narrow head that most of them did, what I assumed was the sad result of inbreeding. His eyes were small and brown and bloodshot. I could smell the alcohol fumes from where I stood, eight feet away.
“So this is the famous coffee shop I been hearing so much about,” he said, swaying on his feet. He looked around disdainfully, as if he were accustomed to patronizing the Parker House in Boston and found our humble establishment to be far below his usual standards.
“How much for a cup of coffee?” he asked, blearily. I was afraid he’d fall down he was so drunk. I went over and pulled out a chair, where he promptly sat, his head hanging.
“Coffee’s on the house. Don’t go to sleep!” I said, alarmed by what customers might think if they found him passed out. At the moment, we were the only people in the place but it was getting on towards lunchtime, when we tended to be busy, or as busy as we ever got.
“I can pay,” he mumbled crossly, pulling a fistful of crumpled dollar bills from his jacket pocket. Something fell out and clinked to the floor. It was the size of a small netsuke, cunningly made in the shape of a creature that looked to be part-frog, part-fish. Unlike netsuke, which are usually ivory, it was yellow metal. Could it be gold?
I bent to pick it up but he was surprisingly fast. He swooped down and grabbed it, stuffing it back in his pocket.
“What’s that?” I asked.
