Innsmouth Nightmares Read online

  Yet survive he had, and his wife’s voice called him onward, and he glimpsed his father’s face through smoke.

  An hour later, with Stephan still paddling, a shadow passed beneath the boat.

  This time he was sure there was something there. He snatched the oar back on board and the surface of the sea rose, smoothing out as if an unimaginable bulk forced water up from the depths below. The surge was gentle rather than violent, carrying the lifeboat forwards and easing the way.

  Against all instincts, Stephan leaned over the side of the boat and looked down. He saw only water, the surface now so smooth that his reflection looked back up at him, broken by ripples from the boat. He could not see any deeper.

  Heart hammering with fear and a keen excitement, he had to fight against the urge to lean out further and plunge his face beneath the surface.

  The surge ended as quickly as it had begun, dropping the boat into another valley between swelling waves, and he picked up the oar again. Just as he scrambled onto the plastic seat once more, he glimpsed something across the tips of the waves.

  Land?

  He gasped and dug the paddle in, trying to drive the boat towards the faint shadow he had seen. He feared he was hallucinating again, and that next time the boat was picked out of a trough he’d see a bank of dark clouds low to the horizon. But after splashing for what felt like eternity the boat rose again, bow first, until he was resting atop a giant swell.

  “Yes!” he shouted. It was definitely land, a wide band of hills and beach on the horizon, lit by the afternoon sun and speckled with breakers. He must have been even closer than he realized if he could see breakers!

  Stephan started paddling again, harder than before. He ignored the pain from his damaged hands, gritting his teeth against the sting of split lips and sunburn, and he started to believe he was going in the right direction. He had to believe that. No other outcome would be fair.

  Mandy had died when the ship went down. She had still been in their cabin, miserable from sea sickness, and Stephan had gone on deck to smoke a cigarette. A jarring thud, a series of dull, inexplicable impacts below the waterline, and he had been flung over the handrail and into the sea, swimming frantically as the boat quickly sank beneath the waves. The only survivor.

  Maybe the cabin had remained watertight for a while. Long enough for her to really think about what was happening and believe him dead. He hoped not.

  Keep paddling, she said, her voice soft and imploring, though he could not see her face.

  “I am,” he said, tears blurring his vision. “I’m paddling as hard…”

  From the corner of his eye he saw something break surface to starboard, emerging like the smooth gray remnants of an ancient wave unspent. By the time he’d turned to look it had vanished, leaving behind a curious speckling luminescence that rose and fell with the swell.

  “Keep paddling, keep paddling,” he said, hearing Mandy’s voice whispering the words beneath his own.

  As the sun dipped towards the land in the distance, so he drew closer. The sea’s majestic swell lessened and the waves became rougher, breaking into white-tops and splashing into the boat. He should be baling, but then he would not be able to paddle. But if he kept paddling for too long, and the waves grew even worse, the boat would be swamped.

  He was close enough now to start making out some detail. There was a small seaside town slouched along the dark strip of land, shadows striving for the sea from huddled rooftops, winding roads leading up from the shore and towards the hills much farther back. The hills were low, heavily wooded, seemingly immune to sunlight.

  Something troubled him. Something about the town. He silently berated himself, concentrating on driving the paddle in, pulling, and again.

  But the tide was taking him in anyway, so soon he stopped paddling and took a closer look.

  A few lights had been lit in buildings close to the shore. They looked like beach huts of some kind, perhaps fishermen’s huts, and the lights pulsed like oil lamps. Down the beach, closer to the breaking waves, a dark line of seaweed seemed to mark the dividing line between ocean and land.

  “I’ll cross that line,” Stephan said. He’d been talking to himself for days, keeping himself company, and he suddenly started crying at the uncertainty of his situation. More unfair than his wife, drowning slowly in their cabin. More unfair than his adoptive father, taken by cancer. He did not feel saved.

  A heavy weight passed beneath the boat once again, drawing it more rapidly towards shore. He squinted in the dusky light. There was something strange about the little town. Something darker than the dusk, because although the sun was still in the sky it seemed to avoid the buildings and streets of that place.

  The dark line of seaweed on the sand was moving. It quivered and flexed like a giant snake, but then Stephan made out what it really was. Not seaweed at all. People. Hundreds of people, standing in line along the beach that fronted their little town, not quite far enough forward to let the foaming water touch their feet.

  Hundreds of people, waiting for him.

  You’re going to be saved, Mandy said from somewhere deep in the ocean’s depths, where perhaps even after all this time her cabin had yet to flood. The man who had adopted him, dead for years, nodded in agreement, his old face lost behind a veil of smoke that wasn’t smoke at all, but salty spray thrown up by the strengthening wind blowing Stephan towards shore.

  He reversed the paddle and started pushing it the other way. His lacerated hands bled into the water. His split lips pouted fiery pain at the sky. His paddling became more frantic as the town grew closer, and with that closeness came the unbearable, sickening realization that after days adrift on the cruel ocean, this was the last place on Earth he wanted to be.

  The sea carried him landward. Another mass passed beneath the boat and it lurched on, and the paddle was suddenly ripped from his hands, disappearing beneath the waves even though it was made of hollow plastic and designed to float.

  Stephan knelt in the middle of the lifeboat, helpless in the face of his own fate. He suddenly had no wish to be saved. As he felt the boat’s hull grinding against the first sandbank that signified the approach of land, he finally made out the staring, strange faces of those who waited. They had been expecting him, and he wondered whether he’d ever been on a ship at all. Perhaps he had always been out here being drawn, steadily and relentlessly, towards this terrible shore. Maybe he was being brought home.

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling horror and fantasy writer from South Wales. He’s had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. Future novels include The Silence and The Hunt. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. A movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, is due for release in 2015, and several other projects are in development. Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net.

  MOURNING PEOPLE

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  As Genna parked her car at the edge of town, she asked herself, and not for the first time: Isn’t there some magic formula to “get over it”? Why couldn’t she be one of those who just compartmentalized in that 1% of the brain that left 99% for living life? She felt cheated that she had never suffered ADD; the ability to concentrate had proven to be a curse rather than a blessing.

  The pitted road that led in and out of town was empty, desolate in fact, but then it was late, and the citizens of Innsmouth rarely left their houses at twilight. She hadn’t been “home” in forty years, but nothing, it seemed, had changed. If anything, the decrepit place of her birth was in even worse shape than before. Trash and garbage strewn on the streets, cracked sidewalks, broken windows everywhere, walls spray-painted with indecipherable graffiti, boarded-up factories, houses blackened by fire, others derelict and choked by yards full of chest-high weeds…She passed the grade school where some of th
e grimmer concepts imbedded within her had been formed. From the looks of it, the red brick chimney must have fallen at least a decade ago, caving in parts of the roof on its way—and no one had bothered to fix it! Was this school still used? Were there still children coming here to learn the hideous history of this place? Did anyone still live here? She saw no lights in any windows. Maybe Innsmouth had turned into a ghost town! But its denizens had always been like this, hiding, secretive, creepy in ways that she only became acutely aware of after she escaped.

  Her parents’ house sat at the dead end of a short street, isolated, the gables warped from wind and moisture, the porch sagging, wood rotting, paint so peeled and faded that the underlying wood showed through creating an ashgray exterior. She stopped to examine it, but from afar. Even a hundred yards away she felt the chill. Was that faint, mournful high-pitched wailing coming from the house? It sounded so familiar and the thought occurred to Genna: that might be my voice! Life had been crushed here. For that reason alone, she did not want to go inside. But, there was no need to enter; a gauzy death shroud blanketed her memories, one that could be lifted at any moment, the sharpened memories triggered by anything, by nothing.

  Innsmouth was an old town, established in the 1600s as a trading port, and her tainted roots went deep. Her family had never kept up the house, and in her lifetime, at least, no one seemed to care about the town’s upkeep in general. It had been that way when she was a child—buildings, and people, falling apart before your eyes—right up to her sixteenth birthday when she ran away to the city to carve out a life despite the despair imbedded in her psyche. She had longed to inhale a deep and carefree breath for the first time in her young life, and had.

  She turned away from the disturbing squalor and headed along the dirt-and-sand-embedded-with-gravel trail that led towards the sea. Footprints of generations of her ancestors were pressed one onto another into this path and as she walked, it felt like stepping on graves.

  Coming back had been a torturous decision; thoughts of returning terrified her. But with the death of her mother, she had to return. The funeral—such as it was—took place without her; that, she could not have faced. Without being aware of the time, months went by and there were specific things that needed to be done: items to be given away, household furniture to be disposed of, papers to be found and read and preserved or destroyed, the aftermath of death to be taken care of. And there was no one else. The idea of being the last of her line left Genna hopeful. At least the madness will end with me, she thought, she hoped!

  But she did not come back for the wrap up of a life. She’d had a company pack up everything that wasn’t furniture and send it to her office because she did not want these vestiges of the past infecting her home. She sorted through boxes and crates and locked containers that had to be broken into, the contents not worth finding let alone securing and saving, many items strange, unknowable, some so disgusting or hideous that she used gloves to hold those things that she immediately dumped into trash bags and put out on the curb. She’d sorted, filed, and mailed items to their ultimate destination, paid taxes, disposed of the land by gifting it to the town to do with as they wished. Everything was done but for one thing, and for that, she had no choice but to return.

  The path led towards a cove that caressed the sea. This small portion of beach and water was not barriered by the strange black breakfront that mimicked the main harbor’s shoreline. Here, the water was free to come and go, the tides to ebb and flow naturally, and it was the only spot where Genna had found fragments of peace and comfort as a girl.

  As she climbed the little hill, ahead, she saw the coldly blue Atlantic. She had spent many days here surrounded by the dead, sitting and staring at the water, watching the breaking waves shove towards shore, then pull back, dreaming under the hot sun of summer, bundled against the icy winds of winter, enduring the storms of every season when the clouds blackened and thunder surrounded her, sometimes lightning so threateningly near that her body trembled involuntarily from a mild shock.

  When she was younger, her mother often found her here, scolding—, “Stupid, stupid girl, the ocean is not your friend! Nothing here is your friend!” She’d yell at Genna as she dragged her home, “This is a cursed place and ours a cursed existence. Take no comfort here. No comfort!” the words indoors followed by the hairbrush until she was taller than her mother and was punished only once more. But by the time she was old enough to escape physically, her psyche had been contaminated.

  Leaving home left her breathless for years, half the time frightened, the other half exhilarated, but it provided a catalyst for insight after the fact. Her mother had been insane with misery, leaking bitterness and hatred into the world, a life wasted, her only joy destroying the lives of others. The woman who gave birth to Genna had never cared for village life, never liked the water, regretted marrying and bearing four children, one of whom had died at birth, two others passing before she did, left with only the troublesome daughter who would not readily obey, who often heard the mumbled words, “It should have been you who died!” In the quiet of the night as she rocked by the fireplace, the woman declared Genna’s rarely-home father, “That filthy monster! A godforsaken demon from a place worse than hell!”

  Genna had always found her father frightening. His grotesque features, jerky, inhuman mannerisms, the vileness that seeped from his pores and permeated his every action, every word, a man whose touch left her skin feeling diseased, whose very presence seemed to suck out her will, leaving her depleted and depressed. She avoided him as much as she could. And once she had gotten away from Innsmouth, she wondered if her crazy mother had had a point. And then the accident—or was it an accident?—that crippled him, and her mother had no way out until he died, and by then it was too late.

  Genna longed for the city, with its opportunities for education, friends, entertainment. Love. And the metropolis she had chosen offered all of that and more. But like a trickle from a stream, she enjoyed a bare minimum of what was possible.

  Even before all the deaths, with her first menstruation, Genna found herself attracted to this small family cemetery at the edge of the high cliff above the salty sea that she had just reached. A rusty twisted coat hanger held the gate precariously closed; she opened it and stepped onto the heavily-sanded soil riddled with sea shell shards that housed her ancestors, her siblings, her father, and now her mother. The bones of grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins once, twice, three times removed were all interred in this rural plot. Lucky children that had died of cholera just after they were born. Hoary old men who had outlived their timid and frightened wives by decades to finally succumb after a century of ensuring misery for their offspring. Beastly women and their repugnant children buried together. Unknown relatives who had died old or young or middle-aged, their remains in coffins stacked atop one another because within the cast-iron fencing there was limited land in this prison of demise. Years ago, Genna measured the cemetery and determined the square footage to be 666, and was not surprised.

  All totaled, just twenty-five headstones crammed the tight bone yard. Made of local stone, several names had been carved on each, the oldest and largest curving gently as befitted grave markers of another age, the more recent deaths inscribed on rectangles the size of a laptop computer. Long before Genna’s birth, the windy sea had eroded the earliest names and dates so there was no way to determine the total number of dead.

  Her mother hated the cemetery. “Only a ghoul would want to go there!” she had shouted, her tone rising to the familiar shriek. “Wicked, you were born bad, of your father’s side!”

  “My morbid one,” her father dubbed her in his monotonous tone, catching her arm with his icy hand, pulling her close, breathing his rank, stale breath of mold and rot into her ear like a worm crawling into the canal, infecting her brain. Words that might, from less of an alien being, have been an endearment. But from him they were tainted by the inhuman look in hi
s rheumy eyes that spoke of dangerous realms where death and madness ruled. Had he been afraid of her or afraid for her? More likely, he was not afraid at all.

  And now her mother lay buried in this stifling seaside cemetery, a place in which Genna had no intention of spending eternity, crushed between an unforgiving mother, a fiend of a father, dead siblings, and surrounded and suffocated by the negativity and hopelessness and pure evil of this long line of rotting corpses. As she stood over the marker already inscribed with her mother’s dates, she was well aware of her own name chiseled into the rock— date of birth, no date of death. Yet.

  “No way!” she snapped. Genna had already made her wishes known, written a Will, prepaid funeral arrangements, bought a space for a cremation urn in a cemetery far from here, leaving whatever money she had to charity.

  She turned away from the markers of death and walked to the south-eastern corner of the cemetery fence which overlooked the edge of the bluff, her eyes taking in the vast and relatively quiet sea beyond. The tide was in, the water very high up the cliff wall, and she knew it would only take one good storm at high tide for strong waves to overtake the sandy ground, flood the cemetery, and wash away graves. That had happened in the past, many times it was said, but apparently no waves had been powerful enough to completely decimate this little village of the dead. Genna hoped that would change. She would like nothing better than to see this testament to a ghastly family from a malevolent town in a world that was increasingly proving itself insane washed away forever. “Let the dead die,” she mumbled.

  Suddenly, a wave crashed over the edge of the cliff, nearly knocking her off her feet, soaking her and the burial grounds. Startled, Genna braced for another onslaught. But the ocean regained its composure. For now. If there was one thing she had learned as a girl it was that the sea was mercurial— anything could happen at any moment and, like everyone in her family, the ocean could be merciless.

  The south-western corner had not been drenched by the wave and she walked there to the little park-bench-like chair for one that she had sat in as a girl, the wood extremely weathered, the metal arms and legs rusted. She had loved to sit here facing the many dozens of enormous sandstone spires that had formed over the millennia, just beyond her reach.