Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  Naomi was already going through what would happen now in her head. The long drive home in silence, promises to call her when they got back and then never seeing Gerry again. Her ringing and leaving messages on his phone, getting increasingly desperate. Alone, deserted.

  No girlfriend, no fiancée, no wife…no family.

  Taking the razor, following her mother’s lead?

  Blood, water…

  She couldn’t have been more wrong. Couldn’t have thought up this worst case scenario in a million years.

  “Neglectin’ his duties, his responsibilities,” the father continued on with his rant. And Naomi found she couldn’t bite her tongue any longer, no matter how things transpired.

  “Gerry is the most caring, responsible man I’ve ever known!” she blurted out. “I love him—and he loves me. Don’t you?”

  Gerry remained silent.

  “Caring?“ said his father. “Did yer care about them other lasses yer brought back here, eh? About what happened to ‘em?”

  All the others, the ones she’d been so jealous of. So they’d been brought back here too? And what had happened with them, he’d dumped them when he got bored? (Hadn’t meant anything…) Gerry had told her she was special, that’s why she’d wanted his family’s approval so much. But now she wasn’t so sure, about him or them.

  Life wasn’t a fucking Disney movie. You put your trust in people, they invariably let you down.

  Their relationship was sinking…

  “Naomi, it isn’t how you think,” said Gerry now, finally finding his voice.

  Making to move towards her, then stopping.

  “Aye, you know the way it has to be, boy. I teld yer. You’ve known all along how this ends, yer were just kiddin’ yerself.”

  “Breedin’ or sacrifice,” said Gerry somberly, his tones starting to match his family’s.

  Pimping out his women…His mother thinking she was a gold-digging whore…

  Rapist…multiple murderer…

  Yer scaring the poor lass.

  “What?“ shouted Naomi, thinking she’d misheard.

  “It’s just like I taught him, just like fishin’,” gargled the father. “‘Cept young Gerald’s the bait now. We sent him out there, funded him with what was left of the town’s gold. He brought back what we needed.”

  A good provider.

  Naomi looked across at Gerry’s mom now, and she nodded. “It’s true, I’m afraid, dear.”

  Town’s gold…Naomi’s hand went to her necklace and its symbol.

  “Well, we couldn’t very well send out his brother—lookin’ the way he does. As natural as that might be.” The father pointed behind her and Naomi turned, screamed when she saw what had risen up out of the water.

  Never been one to mind her surroundings ….

  Devastating floods in its wake…

  Blood, water…

  So close she could do nothing but see him: the naked thing in front of her. He had the same bulging eyes as the father, but these were much more prominent in the middle of a face that could only be described as hideous: framed by fine, slicked back hair. Lumps and bumps covered the skin, while a set of flapping gills opened and closed on his neck. The mouth was much wider than any normal person’s, framed by blubbery lips, and when the “man” parted these he revealed row upon row of needlelike teeth.

  Gerry’s brother, the monster.

  Natural-looking…

  “Came on ‘im powerfully quick, it did,” Gerry’s pop continued. “But it gits us all in the end.”

  Naomi tried to run past the brother, had to save herself, but he grabbed her, spun her around so she was facing the room again—then wrapped two strong arms around her, the webbed fingers gripping.

  “Be careful!” shouted Gerry. “Don’t hurt her…”

  “Yer still don’t get it, do you, she’s not yours!” snapped Gerry’s pop.

  “Not just yours,” corrected Gerry’s mother.

  Didn’t want to share her…

  “You…” She pointed at Naomi. “You belong to all of us. And yet to none of us. He wasn’t lying when he said you were special, y’know.”

  “You’re all insane!” shrieked Naomi. She was still asleep in the car, hadn’t woken up—and this was all some crazy dream, some nightmare brought on by her fears. Or something in that horrible tea she’d been given? Maybe she’d been poisoned?

  “Can’t you feel it, child?” the woman asked her. (Inside you’re something more…Beneath the surface you’re…) “It’s how you two found each other, it’s why you felt the way you did.”

  The connection? Was that what this crazy bitch was talking about?

  Was aware of her as soon as she’d appeared.

  Always the outsider…

  “Your blood, dear. It’s in your blood! Your heritage is the same as Gerald’s.”

  Her father’s disease? (“Natural as that might be…”) Her mother not being able to live with the consequences…?

  Blood in the water…

  Some hid, some escaped.

  Escaped and carried on with their lives elsewhere, loving other people, having families, having children…She’d never known her grandparents, had barely known her parents, but what if—

  The woman shambled back over again and held Naomi’s necklace up to examine it. “The symbol of The Order. He would be pleased…He will be pleased. The one you have been saving yourself for all this time.”

  “What…what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You know. Deep down you know, child…Princess.”

  Girlfriend, fiancée, wife…family.

  Naomi fought against the knowledge, just as she fought against Gerry’s brother, but the woman was right. About the blood, about her family. She’d always wanted one and now she’d got it, hadn’t she? One who adored her, in fact. It just hadn’t been what she’d expected. And she realized then, that she hadn’t been abandoned after all.

  “A fine catch,” burbled the father.

  He’d done them proud…

  She was perfect.

  The older man’s blanket was slipping from his lap and now Naomi could see the many tentacles he had for legs, writhing and sliding over each other. She almost screamed again.

  “And there is much to do,” said the mother. “A festival to prepare for, an end of the dark times to look forward to.”

  Dark times, dark clouds. Dark shadows…They had hung over this place for such a long time, and would continue to do so for many years to come. Nothing they ever did would change that, not even giving her to—

  A big step…a watershed…

  She suddenly felt very, very scared: of letting go, of losing herself, of opening up to—

  She’d feel the loss so deeply…

  Naomi tried to imagine what would happen to her, the worst case scenario, but nothing would come. It couldn’t, it was beyond her imagination.

  All she could see now in her mind’s eye was the redness, so thick. Thicker than—

  Water…The water and the blood.

  The blood and…

  The water.

  Paul Kane is the award-winning, bestselling author and editor of over fifty publications, including the Arrowhead trilogy (gathered together in the sell-out Hooded Man omnibus), The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, Hellbound Hearts, Lunar, and The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen, including for primetime US network television. You can find out more at his website (www.shadow-writer.co.uk), which has welcomed Guest Writers such as Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Dean Koontz and Stephen King.

  STRANGE CURRENTS

  Tim Lebbon

  Stephan didn’t think he could sleep, not when to close his eyes might mean death. But he was startled awake when two sea birds dropped into the boat, landing heavily, slumping to the fiberglass deck, displaying all the signs of exhaustion and on the verge of death themselves. He thought back to the dreams he’d had during the sleep he should ha
ve never let claim him. Dark dreams, where the sea rose up in vast towering shadows, and the hidden depths were crowded. His eyes hurt. His skin was rough and sore, as if burnt beneath alien eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t slept at all.

  The two seagulls hobbled around the bow of the lifeboat. But their exhaustion was feigned, and when Stephan moved to catch them, they took flight. One of them flapped away across the waves and was soon lost to sight. The other circled a few times, caw-cawing laughter or a warning. Then it followed its cousin, and Stephan thought, They must have come from land.

  The realization should have galvanized him. But he found it hard to move, to summon enthusiasm, even hope. Seven days ago the lifeboat’s entire encasing structure—support posts and rods, tarpaulin, fixing ropes—had been torn away when the craft capsized. It had been pure luck that Stephan’s foot had caught in a trailing cord, the twine twisting around his ankle while he’d been buffeted and spun in the raging water. When the boat righted itself again he had gone with it, tearing the muscles in his calf and injuring his knee, but saving his life. He’d been left draped over the boat’s side, staring down into the water at the dark, massive shape that seemed to fade away beneath him.

  There had been no storm. Something had capsized the boat and caused the maelstrom, and he still thanked whatever luck had saved him that he had not been cast into the sea. The boat was tiny compared to what he had seen—

  —A whale, that’s what it was, surfacing to breathe and finding him in the way, or perhaps simply curious—

  Baling water with a plastic container he’d managed to save, he had kept the cord wrapped around his lower leg for another day before finally freeing himself.

  Fifteen days exposed to the whims of the North Atlantic weather. Luckily it was summer, otherwise he would have frozen to death long before the impending starvation, dehydration and sunburn would take him. Yet though the winds in the daytime scorched his skin, night breezes blew in cutting and cold. Stephan’s will to survive was strong, but the reality of survival had been growing weaker.

  Those birds came from somewhere.

  Carefully, painfully, he knelt up and crawled the length of the boat. It was small, designed for a dozen people, and six inches of water swilled in the bottom. He’d stopped baling days ago. Most of the fixtures and fittings had been ripped away during the capsize, including his flares and the small bag containing food. He often wondered where that bag was now. He thought it would probably float, as the knot he’d tied in the neck had been strong, the drawstring tight. The food was all in packets, not tins, and there was little in there to give enough weight to counteract the air caught in the bag.

  Maybe it would float forever. Caught on the tides, nudged by the violent winds, his food bag would likely survive him, drifting across the North Atlantic past Greenland, Iceland, back towards Europe where most of its contents had originated. A ship might run it down and thrash it to pieces beneath its propellor. A sea creature might take it; perhaps it would be swallowed whole unnoticed by a whale or chewed apart by a shark.

  Perhaps it would float out here until the world came to an end and humanity was no more. A lonely voyage lasting forever.

  “Wake up, Stephan!” he shouted. Tried, at least. But his throat was dry and swollen, his lips split from sun and salt spray, and his cry consisted mostly of blood spat into the bottom of the boat, and a groan of pain.

  One of the boat’s four paddles was still clipped to the side, the metal fastenings bent by the force of the coverings being ripped off. He’d tried to loosen it soon after the capsize, found the task difficult, and left it. Now he needed the paddle more than ever. To follow the birds. To find land.

  Perhaps he might even survive.

  “Don’t think about it,” he whispered, and the high and lonesome sound of the constantly moving sea tried to swallow his words.

  His hands were cracked and swollen, but he plucked at the oar’s fastenings for an hour, until his fingernails were split and the tips bleeding. At last the paddle sprung free and he cried out in delight.

  It was cold and heavy in his hands, but it felt like taking action.

  The birds were long gone, but he had taken a bearing from the sun when they flew away. Allowing for the time since they had flown, he took another visual bearing, sat on one of the raised seats at the side of the boat, and started paddling.

  After fifteen days every action hurt, every movement denied the stillness and supplication his body demanded of him. He had never been so hungry and thirsty, and several times over the past few days he’d thought he was going to die. Sitting there, leaning against one of the seats cast into the structure of the vessel, he’d felt darkness closing in.

  Something always pulled him through. Sometimes it was his wife’s voice, sweet Mandy beseeching him to survive. Once it was a memory of building a bonfire with the man who had adopted him and become his father, a time from his childhood long-since forgotten until now. And once it was something he could not identify. A strange sensation, a feeling of need and craving that reminded him of dreams he used to have when he was sick. He could not adequately describe them then, though they had been terrifying and made him scream himself awake. And he could not explain that feeling now. Only that it had saved him.

  It was as if someone or something else wanted him to survive, and once he had surfaced from the darkness, that someone or something drew back once again, observing rather than intruding.

  He shook his head. Foolish thoughts. He’d run the gamut of emotions since the ship had gone down, but now that he was taking action he promised never to be tempted by death again. Life was too precious. That preciousness had brought him here, in his attempt to discover where he had come from, who his true parents had been. His adoptive father had told him nothing of them, had refused to even speak of family. Only that they had brought him across the sea, abandoned him, and returned to some strange place.

  He slapped the paddle into the water and pulled, slap and pull, and though he could not tell whether he was moving, or even in which direction, it felt like he was doing something positive at last.

  The seascape was vast and unforgiving, the great swell bringing the horizon near and then drawing it out again, as if teasing him. The steady breeze sprayed salt water across his face and exposed arms and hands, making his raw wounds worse and offering a tantalizing taste of water that would only make him sick. Sometimes he thought he saw land across the heads of the swells, but the next sight would reveal it to be simply another wave in the distance. He heard the echoing hiss of the waves’ laughter as his hopes were dashed once again.

  He pulled on the paddle. The boat was too big for him to move on his own, he knew that, it would have taken six people rowing to even hope to take charge of the vessel’s direction. But he had to try. His wife Mandy’s voice convinced him of that. His father’s face seen through the haze of bonfire smoke, the spit of knots in wood, the rich, sweet smell of burning branches from the evergreens growing around his grandparents’ garden.

  “The birds came from somewhere,” he said again and again as he paddled. The words formed a chant, a song that the waves and wind sang along with him.

  Something passed beneath the boat.

  Stephan felt a pull on the oar as if a sudden, violent current was attempting to tug it from his hand. He held on tight and hauled the oar back into the boat. The sense of something huge passing beneath him was powerful, and he feared he was about to capsize again. The boat seemed gripped in a strong wake, drawing it up the face of an oncoming wave and down into the trough beyond. Stephan was powerless, and he waited for the moment when the thing below would rise up, break surface, show him secrets that had been hidden since the moment the ship had sunk.

  But nothing happened, and the casual swell of the sea guided the boat once more.

  Nothing had gripped the boat. Just the strange currents swirling here, flows of warm and cold water starting as a splash at the equator and taking on energy beyond measure by the time th
ey made it this far north. Such was the way with the sea. Most people thought it was a silent mass, still and calm but for the waves texturing its surface. In reality the sea was a living thing, clasping the fixed continents in its smooth embrace and curling, twisting, abrading them over eons too vast for the human mind to contemplate.

  Stephan had just gained a glimpse at that vastness. Rather than feeling awed, he was only scared.

  He picked up the paddle to follow the birds once more.

  If a distress signal had been sent, it had not been acted upon quickly enough to save him. If the lifeboat had a homing beacon, it had either failed or been washed overboard. He had seen plane trails several times since the sinking, but they were high in the stratosphere, passenger jets taking people across the wide ocean upon which they could not imagine such a story being played out.

  He could remember little from that awful night, only that he had found himself in the lifeboat, darkness pressing heavy all around and the sea roaring and convulsing in a violence that terrified him to the core. Sea sickness had crippled him, curling him in a ball beneath the boat’s flapping covering. Fear refused to let him go. It grasped him in its wet, salty grip, squeezing hard, forcing more puke when there was nothing left to bring up.

  He was only a passenger out here.

  “The birds came from somewhere!” he said again, but already he was doubting his knowledge. Were such birds native to the sea or the land? Had he really read somewhere that seagulls were land-based? Or could the species he had seen cruise above oceans for weeks on end, landing on boats or debris for a brief rest, sleeping on the wing?

  He didn’t know for sure, and such uncertainty angered him. He was an ignorant, thrown into an alien environment with no clue how to survive.