Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  “Rest now,” she urged in that brackish voice of hers. Elmira curled her willow fingers around the father’s arm. “Rest…”

  Proper rest was difficult to achieve while he was hunched upon that bowed and splintery box. He did what he could to tame his shivering and tried to pretend that the few sputtering candles that sat about the room were actually warming. Those tin can lamps were crude to the point of ugliness, but the father was grateful for their light, for it had been so long since he’d seen light. He also enjoyed the curiously cozy fragrance they emitted, so much as his altered nostrils would allow.

  “That’s it, my child,” she said, “breathe it all in, let it nourish you.”

  The scent was reminiscent of cooking meat. The candles were in fact cans of congealed meat dripping, which the old woman had collected and fastened with slow burning wicks. There were greasy hisses of the warmed animal fat.

  Elmira settled into a rocking chair with a cracked runner. She began to rock, slowly, like a creaking pendulum.

  “You know why you’re here?” she asked the father.

  She pointed to the wall. He noticed the water stains and the rivulets of rain that were breaching the cabin with ease. “In that lighthouse out there, right on the point, that’s where it’s gonna happen, where she’ll come to you.”

  5. Lighthouse

  The old woman had taken her leave. The tin can lanterns had been snuffed by the pooled fat, and the rain seemed to have ceased. The father gazed out the window, using what were only nominally eyes to study the brackish glimmer that radiated through the fog. He rose and shuffled to the door.

  The mist was still settled over the heath. For all the father knew, it covered every inch of the world. Somewhere beyond this pulsating shroud, the sun struggled to shine.

  He stood and allowed the noises of the terrain to be collected and amplified within his seashell ears. All he could hear was the susurrus of the distant surf calling him back to his deep home.

  The father knew nothing of this village, but Elmira had mentioned the lighthouse last night, with its beacon that swept the water with a wand of white light.

  The land was even more treacherous in the fog than it would have already been for the father’s naïve feet. He went wayfaring for hours, unsure which way to go. He did not spot a single living soul.

  Only after he heard the sound of a foghorn, that deep lamenting wail, did he begin to navigate. The low sonorous call gave a primordial voice to the mist.

  At length, he found the lighthouse.

  With great care he made his way to the end of the stout pier and searched for the door.

  It was hanging ajar. The damp gusts rolling in off the water wobbled the iron door back and forth, but were not strong enough to slam it shut. The father slipped through the opening and stood within the cone-shaped hull of the lighthouse, listening. A loaded, anticipatory silence held fast within the oblong chamber.

  His tedious ascent up the staircase of spiraling iron ended in a welcome increase of light. For although the fog was just as thick at this perch, the lighthouse chamber was paneled almost entirely in windows, allowing much of the stormy glow to illuminate the wooden console with its primitive gauges and switches, a table hosting a metal coffee urn and hot plate, and a cot. The lighthouse was abandoned. Here the foghorn was uncomfortably loud. Its two-tone signal made his chest ache.

  The father moved to the cot and noticed that the pillow was soaked with water. It was also brightened with an artifact, a curled thing like a stillborn seahorse. A shell, its inner folds the colour of a warm living flesh.

  He raised it to where his mouth should be.

  6. Roused

  A cry like the trilling of a thousand mad birds wrenched Rose off the wave of beige sleep she’d been savoring for what seemed to be years. Grief often swaddles its victims in a soothing oblivion, protecting them from assailing dreams. So when Rose roused to a darkened bedroom, she was certain that the noise was not a product of her imagination.

  She slipped out of her bed and passed by her snoring aunt.

  Out the back door and across the dewy lawn, Rose moved like a rat of Hamelin, lured and lulled by a monotonous music only her charmed ears could perceive.

  She shuffled toward the waterfront, where none of the drunken revelers or the whores even noticed the barefooted form dressed in a nightgown that was almost phosphorescent within the unsavory shadows of the wharf.

  The lighthouse soon met her gaze. It was enrobed in a strange fog, luminous and animated. As the damp wind teased out thin tendrils of smoke from the vertical fog bank, they curled like fingers in a gesture of beckoning. Rose heeded, hooked upon those curling clouds until she found herself standing at the tower’s open door.

  By now the high note had ceased and all was silent, save for the tides that plopped and clapped against the floodwall and the pillars of the docks.

  She entered and looked up the fog-brightened staircase. A mannish silhouette stared back at her. It raised the shell.

  Rose raced up the steps, crying, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Breathless, she reached the summit and ran toward the figure that stood with open arms.

  Or things like arms.

  The first warning Rose received was olfactory; the chloral stench of decaying marine life, the cloying smell of brine.

  What stood before her was a patchwork thing, a doll of flotsam and squirming membranes of sea life. The eyes were pits that pulsed with gray oysters and the flesh was an armor of shellfish and other scuttling things. The mouth was an aspect of jellyfish that flexed like a yoni. Rose was horrified to hear that the creature was trying to speak.

  The father-thing scooped her up with ease and carried her limp form down the coiling steps. Somewhere deep in her consciousness, like the memory of a distant dream, images of an impossible city began to flower before her mind’s eye. It was as if whatever fell intelligence animated this abomination was attempting to reassure her, to tempt her with the glories of what laid in wait for her many leagues below.

  Rose wondered if this was in fact her father after all, transformed by the taint of Y’ha-nthlei. She hoped the city was as glorious as it seemed. And then she thought no more.

  7. Requiem

  Rory O’Fey had scarcely been conscious for the better part of a week once the crew of the S.S. Imperium had fished him out of the waters. They’d spotted him at the last possible second. The surging bow of their great ship would have halved him had some of the men not rushed to the side of the vessel and frantically pushed the prostrate man aside with their oars.

  Exactly how long he’d been floating upon the slab of driftwood the men of the Imperium never did ascertain. The man had only the shorn clothes on his back and nothing in way of identification.

  The medic estimated by Rory’s severe dehydration, his blistered and near-purple flesh, and general delirium that he’d been adrift for approximately a week. It took ten days of near-constant care to bring the rescued man back to a state of lucidity, at which time he told the captain and medic his story. He’d been night fishing off the shore of Innsmouth when a freak gale assailed the tiny schooner he and his friend had been in. The boat had not only capsized but had actually cracked in two. Rory had managed to cling to one of the wooden shards, but his partner, he knew, was gone. He floated, he prayed that the good Lord send an angel to watch over his daughter Rose, and he waited for his inevitable demise.

  The Imperium was unable to reroute its course back to Innsmouth, so instead they messaged the nearest port and arranged for Rory O’Fey’s transport back to his New England fishing village.

  The exaltation of his homecoming was short-lived. Rory’s sister broke the news to him as soon as he stepped off the bus. Dear Rose had also gone missing.

  As to what came next, one can only go by the local gossip and the eventual published obituary.

  Rory O’Fey was committed to the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers just seventy-two hours after returning home to Innsmouth and
learning of his daughter’s disappearance. That first night, after having imbibed a great quantity of rum, Rory claimed that he had heard his daughter calling to him from the pier. He rushed to the waterfront to meet her.

  Rory was discovered at dawn the next day, laughing and gibbering nonsense. He claimed that he had seen his Rose rise up from the churning sea. She had reached for him with arms of limp, dripping kelp. Her hair was a tangled mass of seaweed, her eyes the wide doll-dead orbs of a beached fish. Her face was a pattern of crustaceans, her mouth a pulsing barnacle that sang to him, that beckoned him, that yearned to kiss his cheek and begged him to return with her to her new home.

  Rory O’Fey died laughing in a padded cell. Rose was never discovered; her fate yet another of the secrets that swim into the cold deeps of legend.

  Richard Gavin is a critically-acclaimed writer who works in the areas of horror and the primeval, oftentimes illuminating the nexus where these fields intersect. He has authored four books of macabre fiction, including At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012), as well as poetry, criticism, and several occult essays for publications such as Starfire Journal and Clavis. He welcomes readers at www.richardgavin.net.

  BETWEEN THE PILINGS

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  The dark blue neon scribble was so faint he had to stare awhile to determine if it said VACANCY or not. Finally Whitcomb decided to take a chance. He went up to the battered screen door beneath the water-damaged sign: Between the Pilings, and in smaller letters Innsmouth Beach, and in even smaller letters, an afterthought, worn almost to illegibility, Accommodations.

  A light was on inside over a small counter, no brighter than a nightlight, really, and he couldn’t tell if the hunched shape beneath it was a person or the back of a chair. But the door was unlocked, so he went inside.

  He didn’t see the clerk. Indeed it was just a counter with a battered surface and the rounded top of a chair behind. He gazed around the shabby, antiqued room. The lichen green wallpaper appeared to be dotted with tiny pale flowers, but they were so faded they might have been random stains. The armchairs and the couch might have originally been of high quality, but were now so scraped and worn it was hard to believe a business would countenance their use. The rug sparkled, but he determined it was from the grains of sand worked into its fibers. There might have been a central pattern, but the design was thoroughly obscured in grime.

  Because of the numerous faded rectangles on the walls, he decided a number of pictures had been taken down. He had vague memories that it had been a fairly full gallery of past patrons displayed here. He didn’t remember this room being so dilapidated. But he’d been barely eight years old when last he’d been here, so how could he know? He’d had no standards. He’d been happy just to be alive, to swim and play and watch television. And to eat cake. Oh, how he’d loved his cakes, the strawberry ones his mother used to make, the slices delivered to him on sparkling white plates, with a kiss on the cheek.

  “Room?”

  The word was so low-pitched and faint it might have come from the floor. Whitcomb looked more closely at the counter, the door behind it. The bluish glow coming from somewhere below the counter’s edge. Had someone just come through the door? But he still didn’t see them. He moved closer, peering over the edge.

  He didn’t believe in staring at people with disabilities—people all had differences, and we were all better off for it, in his opinion. But because he couldn’t quite grasp the young man’s malady, Whitcomb’s gaze was fully engaged in staring.

  The body on the wide chair was relatively short, fat and lopsided, and he thought, collapsed as if the spine or a portion of the spine had been removed, allowing the rest of the young man to fall down in a clump because now there was too much flesh for the available height. The head was pushed forward by the swollen neck so that it was easier for the young man to look at the small computer screen in front of him than to look at Whitcomb above him. His too-fleshy fingers flapped against the keys. His skin was pale and oily, and poorly washed. Whitcomb thought of a giant frog that had once frightened him as a boy.

  “Yes. I would like to rent a room. For three days, perhaps four.”

  “That’ll be two days in advance then,” the young man said, still without looking up. “Forty-five dollars on the counter please.”

  Whitcomb put his money down. The clerk used a pole with a hook on it to transfer keys from a pegboard to the counter, all without taking his eyes off the screen. “Number eight. You been here before?”

  “A long time ago. I was a child.”

  “Won’t have changed much, ‘cept the beach is a tad closer. You have to leave your car parked up here on the street. Nobody’ll bother it—Innsmouth isn’t like other places. There’s some steps at the end of the building. You take those down under the boardwalk and out to the beach. The rooms are built around the timber pilings.”

  “I remember that part. It’s unusual.”

  “It’s why we have the name. Number eight is near the middle. But you’ll have to wait up here a bit while the maid sweeps it out.”

  “Sweeps it out?”

  “We have a sand problem.”

  Whitcomb didn’t remember a sand problem, nor was he exactly sure what that phrase meant. But children often didn’t notice the things adults classified as disastrous. The opposite, Whitcomb thought, was also true.

  He looked for a place to sit. The couch looked like it might sink and fold itself around him, and the seats of all the chairs were thoroughly, darkly stained. He picked the least objectionable one, closed his eyes, and sat down. It made a squishing sound, as of rotting fruit.

  The room was silent for a time except for the flap-clicking of the keys on the other side of the counter and the occasional sigh or struggle of breath from the clerk. Whitcomb could see out the dingy front window and down the street: spare of street lamps or even the usual illuminations leaked from windows or car headlights. Still, a bit of parchment glow made the shadows deeper and fuzzy-edged and sometimes runny, as darkness flowed from door to door, from one side of the street to the other. Feet and fingers and faces turned away. It was probably just him and his softly dying memories, but they might have been real. Had it been this way when he was a child? But everything was some bright adventure in a child’s eyes, especially on vacation. His mother had hated it, he remembered that much, right up until the end.

  That summer, his mother had wanted to return to the Southern seacoast where she’d been raised, to the extensive sands of Myrtle Beach or at least Virginia Beach so that their son could have “a proper beach experience,” but his father insisted they had to stay in New England—they couldn’t afford to travel farther than that. His father had won—as he did all arguments in which money was involved. At that point Mother wanted nothing more to do with the planning.

  He hated those old men who babbled all the time, who had to fill up every silence with their voices, but there was so much to talk about, and no one to talk to.

  “The billboards on the highway going in? I remember them as being so much brighter. That first one, Visit Historic Innsmouth, with a collage of quaint Victorian buildings. You can barely make out the details now.”

  The clerk said nothing. But even when Whitcomb had been a child and saw that billboard for the first time, the colors had seemed off, shaded into dirty grays. Far more bothersome had been the cartoon character who was supposedly speaking those words. Whitcomb had guessed it was meant to be a fish. But the eyes were wrong, the pupils appearing fixed and dilated. Perhaps he was editing it in the remembering, but he recalled them as the eyes of a dead human being. On this trip that figure was missing completely, that side of the billboard scratched out.

  “The second billboard, well, there’s not much of an image left at all, is there? I remember this lovely picture of the Innsmouth pier with a wide shot of the ocean. Now everything is so heavily graffitied—loops and swirls and all kinds of nastiness emerging from the waves.”

  “I�
�ve never been to the highway,” the clerk murmured. “I’ve never seen them.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Whitcomb thought perhaps he’d been rude to the young man, insensitive to his disability, whatever its specifics. He would not ask him, then, about the final billboard, now completely blank. Worse than blank, actually— scoured down to gray, flaking wood. He couldn’t imagine how the damage had occurred—even a hurricane wouldn’t have created such complete erasure.

  He tried to remember what it had looked like before, but he had never understood what it had been intended to depict. It had been in the process of being changed at the time, he thought, newer strips pasted over older ones, or perhaps the newer bits torn off to reveal what lay underneath: the legs of a sunbathing beauty married to a beached sea lion or something similar, a chaos of torn and frayed buildings collapsing over them.

  He felt a cold draft and glanced at the front door. He saw no obvious gap at the bottom, but there was sand there, fingers of it flowing his way as if blown. Suddenly the door banged open, and a squat gray woman stood there holding the largest broom he had ever seen, the thick shaft of it filling her hand. “The Mister’s room is ready!” she proclaimed, and glared at him. He came quickly off the chair and squeezed past her, dashing to his car to retrieve a small suitcase.

  The trip down the stairs was long, and Whitcomb was glad not to have a steamer trunk to drag. It was also dark and the railing minimal, so he took the steps slowly. In fact, it was so deeply in shadow in places that the only illumination was a sliver of moonlight reflected off the damp edges of scattered timbers.

  He remembered negotiating these steps as a child. Of course it had been daylight and mid-summer then. He remembered alternating areas of sunlight so bright it glazed the gray boards a brilliant white between shadows so dark he disappeared stepping into them. His mother behind him had been hysterical, sure he would kill himself flying down those rickety stairs.