Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  Had they changed in four decades? She sat down and began to count them as she had done as a child, then stopped herself from enacting this useless ritual. Oddly, every death in her family produced a new limestone stack, or that’s what she thought when she was young and then later rationalized that she had miscounted, though she was not convinced that she had. These ‘people’ as she liked to think of them, were a curiosity. A fluke of nature. There had been no one to ask about this—certainly not her parents. After she left home she had done research on this phenomenon, but nothing she read explained why or how new spires could form so quickly. Like so many things in her life, she could only attribute this weirdness to the town itself. Her mother had been right about one thing: Innsmouth was cursed.

  She threw back her head and looked up: the hardened conicals stretched higher than the burial grounds, higher than the town itself. Their pointed tips resembled fangs hell-bent on piercing the darkening sky, ten, twenty, fifty feet above the cliff, like children, women and men, tapering, and at the top a small head-like ball had formed. As a child she had talked to her “people”, but they never answered. That was probably just as well.

  “You’ve been silent all this time,” she said now, and the towers said nothing. “Are you guardians? Watching over the graves? One for each of them, like sentinels, protecting from above the monsters that lie below? Or are you protecting me from the monsters? What are you?”

  The morning of her sixteenth birthday, at low tide, she had descended the cliff and spent the day wandering the beach between these enormous pillars, stepping carefully over the jagged rocks connecting them. She touched every one, their porous surfaces like rough skin, mica sparkling jewel-like in the sun. That day, she became mesmerized by these ancient spires, connected to these “people” individually and as a “family”—and she lost track of time.

  As the tide rolled in, water washed up to her ankles, then to her knees, hips, waist, up to her chest, chilling her skin and muscle and to the bone, until she shivered uncontrollably. “I could die here,” she told the spires, hoping that she would. Hoping to never return home. Longing to stay in this forest of sandstone people forever.

  She imagined letting the water rise higher still until it swallowed her whole and the ocean flowed deep inside and she merged with the salty water and “Genna” was no more.

  Suddenly she realized that she had sunk deeper and deeper with each retreating wave. The undertow had caught her to the thighs, her legs almost cemented in quicksand, and Genna had to struggle for her life as each wave drew her further down and threatened to engulf her. She ducked under the water to dig fast and deep into the saturated sand to extricate herself, swallowing brine, knowing she would be buried within a short time. Just as she managed to free both legs, the water rose above her head.

  Gasping and choking—she did not know how to swim—she fought her way to the craggy rock face, pulling herself up the cliff with shaking arms, quaking as terror roiled through her. Finally, she reached the top and stood trembling, staring at the spires. Why had she gone down there? Had they enchanted her?—she didn’t believe that. But, she could have drowned! Maybe she should have!

  Whatever lesson she had learned that day was reinforced when she arrived home wet and sandy. Her mother had broken the hairbrush—the worst and final beating of her life—and that night forty years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, she ran away.

  “Did you pull me in that day?” she asked the spires now, their silent, dark forms outlined against a gray sky deserted by the sun. “Did you want me to join you? Were you trying to save me? Why are you here?”

  Like a response, the wind gusted hard, whipping her hair into her face, snapping her coat around her legs, rattling the leaves on nearby trees. The waves were building and she sensed a storm rushing towards shore. She turned to leave.

  Suddenly a sound stopped her.

  Genna…

  Had someone called her name? She turned in all directions, finally her eyes settling on the motionless pillars. That sound was joined by other sounds, confusing her. At first two, then more, then many, a syncopated harmony, a high-pitched choir of discordant voices—no, not voices! The sounds reminded her of steam whistles, haunting, otherworldly, but each one a different tone, shrilling, shrieking out her name.

  It must be the wind, crying through the pores of the obelisks, she told herself. But the mournful wailing built to a scream. Genna covered her ears; it didn’t help. Soon her own cries join the others: “Stop. Please, stop! I just want this to stop!”

  Genna… the otherworld whistled, Genna…

  Tears gushed from her eyes. “Is this my fate?” she cried. “To be with you? To be like you? To die here? Is this what you all want from me, what you’ve always wanted from me?”

  The mournful whistling grew louder, sending chills racing up her spine, and her body quaked in terror. These haunting ghosts demanded she capitulate to a preordained destiny. Her feet felt planted in the soil of the dead and she could only sob and scream in horror as a new spire rose above the cliff before her eyes, one that seemed all too familiar.

  She had been obligated by a promise made to her mother, who insisted on it over and over for sixteen years. Return. To the cemetery. To the graves. To visit my grave. And Genna had kept her promise. That was all. She could go now. But her mother was shrewd and knew she would wait, watching the water, mesmerized as always by the spires, because her mother had found her here so often. But couldn’t she go home now? Leave this cursed place forever, and…

  An immense wave crashed over the cliff, pulling back hard, dragging her towards the sea. She grabbed a post of the fencing and felt it give. She let go of the metal, staggering to keep her footing, and watched the iron fly into the air then plunge down into the sea. The second the waves and wind lulled enough, she turned and ran, even as another enormous wave crested and tried to snag her from behind. But, she had reached the gate.

  Genna…The monster monoliths whistled. A mournful sound from beyond the grave. Genna… Her name, her mother’s voice, her father’s voice. All the generations calling as one.

  She raced back along the path through darkness and ferocious wind, the sea crashing in her wake. She fled through the town, past her fearful childhood home, to the safety of her car. Even inside, with the windows closed, she heard the morbid whistles beckoning her to a grave.

  Shivering, hair and clothing dripping, her trembling hands so wet they slid along the steering wheel, she started the engine and drove out of town quickly, gasping at a pace synchronized with the thudding of her heart, the eerie sounds now imbedded in her brain.

  Drive carefully, she warned herself. The storm was chasing her. The whistling acted like an audio vortex, trying to suck her back. If she had an accident, if she died here…they would bury her with her ancestors!

  She risked a glance in the rearview. Through the gathering fog of night, the spires stood like rigid mourners at a funeral, patiently waiting for the corpse. She could still hear their wailing, the cries of loss, and suspected she always would.

  Genna floored the gas pedal then watched until the black mist had devoured all trace of Innsmouth, and its mourning people.

  Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, over two hundred short stories, six collections, one nonfiction book, and has edited thirteen anthologies. Some of her current and upcoming short fiction can be found in Searchers After Horror; The Darke Phantastique; Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame!; Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women; The Madness of Cthulhu 2; Gothic Lovecraft; Dreams From the Witch House; Black Wings V; and an essay in Stone Skin Bestiary. Upcoming anthologies are Expiration Date; and nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery and the Macabre (both 2015). Join her on Facebook.

  THE BARNACLE DAUGHTER

  Richard Gavin

  1. Leaves

  Grief blooms within the girl. It sprouts up from the once-fallow acre of confusion that padded her heart. To her, death was but a word, something distan
t and vague and ill-defined. “Your father has died, Rose,” her aunt had said. “He’s left this world, gone to live with the angels.”

  Though the reality of death was new to her, Rose could appreciate its mystery notwithstanding. Born and raised in this smallish town that hemmed the sea, it was not difficult to experience the ineffable, for the water was wide and deep and reposed darkly, even on the sunniest of days. Rose had been taught inside the tiny chapel (which served as a primary school on secular weekdays) that the water tables had shifted over great spans of time. Parts of the entire continent had been slowly ingested by the sea, taken below into the churning unknown. Since learning this, even after the teacher had assured her that such changes occur in what he called “deep time”, Rose felt that the ground beneath her feet was not so stable after all.

  To say nothing of the daily rituals that took place far from shore, when Innsmouth’s trappers and fishermen would press out in their boats (all of which seemed battered, brittle, and ancient) to plunge nets and wooden traps and threaded hooks into that heaving expanse in order to trawl up strange and wriggling things that dwelt beneath the surface. These living prizes would be carted back each day, delivered to the lines of women and men with their aprons of soiled rubber and their knives that were marred with rust or old blood or both.

  Only once had Rose gone to the pier in order to watch her father work. The sight of those creatures scurrying sideways, or groping their surroundings with antennae, or flogging the gutting table with their ropey tentacles, was too much. She not only shunned the docks where the moored fishing boats bobbed like tethered coffins awaiting burial at sea, Rose also refused to ever swim at Innsmouth Beach.

  There was a world out there below those waves of bottle-green, of midnight-blue. What were its laws, Rose wondered? How did those alien things make sense of their world? Did they also have customs, a faith?

  Sailing out to snatch away these creatures from their habitat seemed not only wrong but dangerous.

  And so it was. For now the water had taken her father. He had been deemed lost at sea, but Rose’s fertile imagination had been assailing her with images of her father being hooked and dragged downward; fished away from the world of men.

  2. Auld Wytcherie

  Whenever the mist rolled in off the water, it would smudge the boundary between sea and land. On such days Rose liked to play a little game where she would close her eyes and creep deeper into the fog, trying to guess where the waves began. Never once had she guessed accurately. The tide was always playful, ebbing farther than she’d anticipated, or pressing too near too soon.

  If the mist could blur these things, why not others?

  It was a child’s reasoning, to be sure. But it was enough to inspire Rose to escape from the wake in her aunt’s cottage and make her way to Elmira, the gray witch of Innsmouth.

  Everyone in Innsmouth knew of Elmira, and though many scoffed at the bulk of the lore that circulated around her, caregivers were uncertain enough to warn their charges to steer clear of her shack on the bluffs.

  Rose was confident that if even one tenth of the things she’d heard about Elmira’s powers were true, her father could well be brought back.

  She went to the shack and she knocked. Elmira answered, but refused to hear the girl’s story until a tariff was paid. Rose gave what little money she had in her pocket; two silver coins of the lowest denomination. They sufficed.

  Elmira listened as the child expressed her desire.

  From a battered sea trunk Elmira produced a bundle of netted rope, and from this, a conch shell.

  “On the new moon, face the sea and blow into this horn. It will rouse your father from the deeps.”

  Unaware of what a new moon was, Rose asked for clarification and received a cursory explanation complete with appointed time.

  Elmira then looked hard at Rose and gave her the requisite warning that came with this form of incantation. Rose nodded, but the old witch was cunning enough to see that the child neither understood nor cared about negative consequences.

  One week later the time came ‘round and Rose heeded it, sneaking away from her aunt’s cottage (her home just until Father returned) while her aunt snored upon the living room sofa bed.

  The beach was springtime vacant. Rose shivered as she crept along the lunar-dappled sand banks. The chloral stench of high tide was especially strong tonight, or perhaps it was the nature of the girl’s task that made the night unseemly.

  Rose had hoped for a fog-laden atmosphere tonight, so that the boundary between sea and land, between dead and quick, would not feel so harsh, so impassable. But the new moon’s glow was untrammelled by mist or cloud. Even the stars seemed nearer and clearer, glinting at the child’s work as if conscious, maybe even judgmental.

  A cluster of night-fishing boats moved in the far distance, their spotlights gleaming like lowlying embryonic moons. Rose knew they were too far from shore to see her as she freed the conch shell from its netting. Beside this she set a photograph of her and her father, along with a bottle of his favorite cologne and one of his caps.

  Rose righted herself, brought the shell to her mouth. The rim of its horn was spiky. It cut her unsteady lip. She closed her eyes and blew.

  What emitted from the twisted shell was a faint and strangled sound. It was not musical, nor shrill; simply a gust of squeaky air that came and went. Rose tried to blow a second call, but this time, her breath could not muster any noise at all. Disappointment scooped at her insides. She slumped down before her hurried and haphazard shrine.

  She thought back to the warning the old witch had given her: “when one is called back from the deep, they do not always return alone…”

  Rose gathered her items and snuck back home. Though she was deflated, she still could not bring herself to glance back over her shoulder to see what, if anything, might have begun a shoreward journey.

  3. The Incanted

  The Deep has its cities, its customs, its denizens. To the eyes of the living, the ocean near Innsmouth’s shore appeared as anything but uncommon, an expanse of lilting weeds, sea-life great and small, and human wreckage.

  Those who perceive with the eyes of the heart, however, witness an altogether more phantastical scene. For there, in the submerged city of Y’ha-nthlei, stood temples whose grandeur was scarcely conceivable, columned galleries where all the knowledge of this Deep race was preserved in a seemingly endless epic narrative that had been carved into the walls of drowned marble. Theirs was a wisdom too nuanced and un-human to ever be grasped by the tender gray matter of humankind, and because of this, a great wedge was placed between their world and yours. To the landlubber, the Deep Ones were rare enough to become mere myth. Their gods, their labyrinthine city, their treasures, all became tall tales with which the sea-hardened regaled the fresh-faced youths. As with all yarns of the water, most were nothing more than products of the imagination of dullards. A keen ear can perceive the all too human yearnings embedded within such stories: the lust for great riches, for the touch of an exotic and impossibly beautiful feminine creature, for battles befitting The Eddas.

  Occasionally warnings would surface about the dangers of those who heeded the Siren song and mated with one of the denizens of Y’ha-nthlei. It’s been said that their progeny are misshapen hybrids, things that suggest two worlds but do not fully belong in either. It is this taint that gives the locals what has been dubbed “that Innsmouth look.” This taint also could explain how certain landlubbers, such as the witch Elmira, developed the powers that were deemed uncanny to those who lacked them.

  But the Sirens beckon still. And sailors are often only too willing to answer.

  How exquisitely rare it is for the call to come from shore!

  To hear that shrill and extended note sail from the land, dive down and down and down to romance the dwellers of the sunken city.

  This particular call was born of a heart that had been broken in a specific way. Each pain bends the call in a unique manner. Th
e wail of a desolate lover differs from that of a mourning mother. This newest call was unmistakably child-like. Thus, what responded was a parental soul.

  This soul rose up, clothing itself in the debris of the ocean floor; coral for its bones, its flesh; crustaceans and seaweed. Fine anemones formed a nervous system.

  The father rose, swam, climbed, and eventually shambled across the fog-smeared terra firma.

  4. Wayfaring

  It took the father a day-and-a-half to reach shore. Thule Fog swirled about all of Innsmouth, obscuring the creature as he went wayfaring among the dunes that lay past the sea.

  In time he found the oblong cabin. Only nominally more auspicious than a shed, this clapboard structure was home to an old woman who introduced herself as Elmira. Her face, which resembled withered fruit, seemed forever in danger of sliding free from its skull-mount. Her fingers were unnaturally long and resembled the boughs of a willow tree; all knotty with arthritis. Her voice was akin to the sound of water struggling down a clogged drain. Her breath smelled strongly of anise.

  The father had ventured to Elmira’s hovel because of its window light. Through those endless banks of pale mist, the guttering light through the grimy pane of the cabin’s only window seemed as bright and rare as a fallen star. The cabin door was suddenly flung open and the father saw the spindle-thin woman, her arm scooping the air again and again in a desperate gesture of beckoning. Elmira was backlit by several wan candles or lamps; a crude and crooked impression of some haloed saint.

  The incline was steep. His waterlogged feet worried across deep divots and stones made greasy by rain and moss. One of these rocks caught him mid-step, forcing him to practically stumble right into the old woman’s home. Immediately Elmira pressed the door closed behind her and guided the father to an upturned crate on the floor.