Shadows Over Innsmouth

It should have made it all so simple, everyone being so considerate and understanding. But it had never been enough for me to see David at weekends, to go away with him for a week’s holiday, or to speak to him on the phone whenever I wanted to. I could not help feeling inadequate, cheated, though I never let them see it. Tony was no doubt astute enough to know it.

And now? David would be even less accessible soon. This would be the first year we had not gone away for a week together somewhere. But all kids outgrow holidays with their parents. I suppose I had been damn lucky that David had been amenable to it for so long. But he had his girl now, and skiing in the Alps. The boy had a bright future, undoubtedly a good degree and potentially a lucrative job in the city.

The prospect of a holiday without David was a grim one. And to spend it here, redecorating possibly, or building the porch I had been promising myself, held little appeal.

I realised I had brought the postcard with me into the room. Again I looked at it. The name of the little port was printed clearly on the back. Appledore, North Devon. I grunted with abrupt realisation. It was somewhere in that part of England where my father was believed to live, when he wasn’t at sea, although he would have retired long ago.

Once more I tried to read the awful scrawl. The signature was tiny, crabbed. It was hopeless, but within the message I was sure I could make out the word father. I shook my head. My mind had made the connection, fooling me.

I studied the picture of the village, its rows of fishing boats. Another world. Could my father really be hiding somewhere along that tiny quayside? How old would he be now? Seventy? More? Was the card perhaps the last effort of an old man to ask to be forgiven? I put it to one side, but even then I think I must have made the decision to follow it up.

***

As the coach wound along the road through the low dunes and beyond to the small sea front, I had my first sight of Appledore. On the far side of the wide estuary, tucked under the hills that came down to the water beyond, the fishing village looked as if it had been set on its very shore, more a part of the sea than the land. There were more dunes somewhere beyond the hills, the open sea behind them, but it was the houses that caught the eye: I could have been gazing back a hundred years or more. They had a changeless look to them, quaint and crowded, perched on the estuary’s edge. They must have been about a mile away across the broad river; the coach would have to travel up that river for another three miles before there was a bridge and a journey back downriver on the other side to the village.

Behind the hills, the sun had already started to drop; there was a hint of gold in the sky.

I’d booked a week here by the sea. Already I felt lonely without David. And this place, beautiful though it was, seemed so remote. I’d begun to wonder if the coach would ever get there.

There was a bridge at Bideford. Here I had to disembark and catch another, smaller bus to get to Appledore, but as it threaded the country roads, emerging at last on the quayside, I determined to enjoy my stay. The ghost of my errant father may or may not be here: I told myself it didn’t really matter.

As I found the guest house, I was aware of the village’s postcard tranquillity, the stark contrast with the environment I had left. For a moment it was an oddly disjointing calm.

In the distance, far across the ebbing grey tide of the estuary, I saw sunlight flash on a vehicle, my coach, perhaps, retreating to a more familiar world, abandoning me for my week.

As I had suspected, the boarding house turned out to be a pub, and after I had eaten my tea in a back room with a handful of other guests (two families on sightseeing holidays, bound for the North Cornwall coast) I went in to the public bar. I am not a tall man, but I had to duck down to avoid the low beams: I might have been in an old sailing galleon. The impression of looking into the past, even stepping into it, persisted. Yet it had become somehow reassuring.

There were a few men in the bar; I felt sure they were locals. They had the look of the sea about them, as if their deep-tanned faces belonged on sailing ships, shaped by salt and spray. I’d made a point of reading something about the North Devon coast and its shipping history. There’d been a good few sailing ships built here and Appledore itself had a real reputation for producing rugged men. “Barmen” they had been called, after the dangerous sandbars out in the estuary and wide bay beyond it.

A hundred years ago and more, they’d voyaged over to the New World, searching out the shoals of cod off New England, or fetching home cargoes of tobacco, their sailing vessels as seaworthy as any others. I’d see old photographs in the books, children sculling small rowing boats almost as soon as they could walk. If my father had been a seaman, I could understand why this place had been so magnetic.

I watched the men at the bar discreetly. They were enjoying a private joke, not ignoring me, but their manner suggested they would not be as approachable as the people I was used to. Even so, I had already made up my mind to ask a few questions about my father.

“Excuse me?”

One of the men, a thick-set fellow with a tangled beard and eyes that sparkled, as if he found me mildly amusing, nodded affably.

“I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find a man called Silas Waite? He lived in Appledore at one time.”

The bearded man continued to nod, turning to his companions. “Silas Waite,” he repeated in a rich burr. “Your father knew him, didn’t he, Dennis?”

The man he had addressed put down his empty glass. His hands were huge and callused; I imagined them hauling deep-sea nets. “I met ’im when I was a boy. Years ago.”

“Has he left?”

The man, Dennis, nodded. “He never settled here. Used to stop off, but never for more’n a few months. Father sailed with ’im. Good trawlerman, Silas Waite. Likely ended up in New England. More’n a few did.”

“When was the last time he was here? I’m sorry, I should have said, he was my father. I’ve been trying to trace him.”

The three men eyed me as if judging it strange that I should not know the whereabouts of my own father. None of them seemed to be able to answer my question.

“Did he have any other relations here, or close friends?”

But again they could offer little help. I was tempted to show them the postcard: it was tucked inside my jacket, though I felt no real encouragement to do so. Instead I thanked them, moving away to a table.

Others entered the pub throughout the evening and although a few nodded to me, none of them seemed ready to begin a casual conversation without being approached. I sipped my beer, thinking that tomorrow I would look into any local libraries I could find and see if I could trace an address. It was beginning to seem like a long shot and I started to feel foolish. I put it down to the long coach journey and decided on an early night.

Outside, the air was extremely still and moonlight washed the narrow streets vividly. The tiny houses crowded me, many of them unlit, though they were not shops but mostly cottages. I could hear the sea, in the middle distance, and as I passed the mouth of a slipway, I caught a strong smell of weed and salt, the precise smell I had thought I detected a few mornings ago when I’d woken up at home. A premonition, I grinned to myself.

The beer and my tiredness had combined with the strong sea air to make me light-headed and the gloom that had threatened me in the pub dissipated. There was no one about: I might have been the only person alive in the entire village. I walked down the ramp of the slipway, curious to see the sand and its landscape by night.

It was treacherous underfoot: at high tide the sea slopped well up the stone ramp. I was careful not to fall. At the bottom there was a glistening expanse of muddy sand and rock, black in the moonlight. It humped up across the estuary, pools of trapped water gleaming between its mud banks. The tide had retreated a long way out, leaving the quay and walls of the village exposed, clumps of weed hanging from the stones below the high water mark. Small boats were scattered here and there on the mud, their buoys half-submerged.

I walked out on to the sand, testing it, relieved that it was not eager to suck me under; instead it was unexpectedly firm. The tide was so low that it looked almost possible to walk across the estuary to the village on its far shore, but I had no intention of being so foolhardy. Even so, I made my way carefully out on to the sands, aware that I had only the silent boats for company. I had never been in such an open space before, not even in a park.

The moonlight was surprisingly brilliant and north of where I stood, on the far shore where the tidal river turned for the open sea, huge banks of dunes rose up, amassed over the centuries by the powerful Atlantic tide. They formed a bizarre terrain, a desolate, microcosmic world.

My isolation began to make me uneasy. I imagined the tide racing in, trapping me. Turning, I looked back at the village, surprised that I had wandered quite so far across the mud flats. To my right, I heard an odd sound: gurgling, as if water swirled down into the sand. Listening, I was aware of other faint sounds beneath my feet, though I took them to be natural to this place.

As I began to retrace my steps, I felt sure something had shifted. I began to think this whole venture was foolish. Panic breathed close by me. My toe caught on an object under the sand and sent me sprawling. The mud stank of rotting fish; I rolled over to get my face away from its evil exhalations. As I lurched up, I saw something poking out of the mud some yards ahead of me.

At first I thought it must be a branch, swept down here by the river. I had seen several. Yet as I looked at it, it moved, pushing down at the mud like an exposed arm, trying to thrust the rest of its body up out of the cloying muck.

Something groaned behind me but I could not bring myself to look back. I stumbled across the mud, veering away from the branch: how could it possibly be anything else?

The slipway was no more than forty yards away but I could see a finger of water sliding across the space between. Dark objects swirled in the water, but they could have been anything. I tried to run— now the sand did pull at me. Abruptly I trod on something soft and squishy and had to stifle a cry as I looked down and saw a face.

Aghast, I stared at the horror, drawing back my foot. But the moonlight showed me the truth: a jellyfish, large as a dinner plate, helplessly stranded. I struggled away from it, glancing towards the slipway.

Someone stood halfway down it. They were evidently watching me, too hidden in shadow to be clearly discerned. Convinced that something was trying to drag itself free of the sand, I got to the foot of the slope. As I went to mount it, the thin coating of weed on its stones defied me and I crashed to my knees. Gaping up, stupid as a fish, I could see the figure. It had moved on up the slipway, but still watched, as if waiting for me. Curiously, I felt a desire to reach it, as if it were vital for me to communicate with it.

I almost called for help, but knew I was being ridiculous. If the men in the pub could see me now, they would have snorted with laughter. Served me right for me being idiotic enough to wander out on to the mud flats.

It was difficult to get back on to the slipway, but I managed it and climbed slowly. By the time I was near the top, the figure had turned away, swallowed by the street above.

I was about to take a last scathing look at the mud banks, when something prevented me. I could hear the sea clearly, but there was something else now, a slithering sound of movement over the sand, from more than one direction. Angry with myself for not having the courage to look, I turned into the street. There was no one about: the village might have died. Then the figure emerged from a doorway a short distance ahead of me.

The moon was behind it, so it was cast like a shadow, though I could see that it wore a heavy coat that would have been more suitable for a storm, or an ocean crossing. The collar was turned up, covering the back of the figure’s head. It was the coat of a seaman. But why was the fellow waiting for me? I thought of the postcard. Could this be the sender? Then why the irritating mystery?

As I stepped forward, the figure moved on. It was clear that he wanted me to follow, but why the hell didn’t the man just approach me? There was no point trying to argue it out: the figure had moved too briskly.

Again I lost him, then discovered that he had turned up another street, even more narrow and confined than the one I was in. And he was waiting for me. Or was all this my imagination?

Was the figure trying to avoid me, justifiably disturbed by my ludicrous antics on the sands?

I entered the cobbled street. The houses were in darkness, the doors locked. Was everyone asleep?

Before I realised it, the figure had slipped into a door or an entry, infuriatingly out of sight. I swore under my breath, but followed, incapable of doing anything else. Stone steps led down into a darkness that was impenetrable. The smell that came up from below was unpleasant, as though it reached down to a weed-choked sea. This was where I needed a torch, I told myself. I took a step at a time, very slowly, convinced that I was an utter fool to be doing any of this.

Beyond the steps in the darkness I could hear the sea and a breeze suddenly caught me, shocking me with its strength, its coldness, as though it had come straight off the open ocean. I had gone down as far as I dared. I had to turn back.

The tantalising figure was above me, beyond the last step. I caught a glimpse of a face before it was gone, the face of an old man. A man, perhaps, who had known my father?

“Hey!” I shouted, the sound muffled by the confines of the walls. Quickly I went up to the street, but to my exasperation the man had gone. I ran down towards the wider avenue, coming into it in time to see the shape turning down another street some yards beyond me. I was about to race after him, determined to catch up with him, when something odd about my surroundings struck me. I didn’t recognise them. It wasn’t just a case of being in an unfamiliar place. These houses were not the same ones I’d seen a few minutes earlier. The cold breeze washed over me again and I had this bizarre idea of fractured time. Frantically I looked about me. These were simply not the same houses. Or for that matter, the same streets.

Where the hell was this place?

The figure must have the answer. He had—what, led me here? There would be an explanation, just as there was for the things I had stupidly imagined on the sands. This was the village, but just another street, surely?

There was a sign on one of the crumbling brick walls. FISH STREET. I hadn’t noticed it before, nor had I noticed the dark shape that rose up between leaning roofs and clustered chimneys: it was a steeple, yet one that looked as though the hand of God had chopped its top third away. I had seen a church from the road when I’d first arrived, though its tower had been intact.

A sudden disgusting stench blew in from the seaward side of the town, so powerful that I gagged, turning to see other figures shambling along the street. They seemed to be stooped, drunk perhaps, heads down. I felt a powerful desire not to be seen by them, so quickly moved on in the direction taken by the figure. Again I felt the acute need to find the man.

The side streets and alleys that ran off from this main thoroughfare were more unusual than I remembered. Decay had positively set in, many roofs collapsed, as if I had returned to the village twenty years on, with no repairs having been made to it in the interim. And it seemed far larger, not merely a village. Between two warehouses, neither of which I recalled, I glimpsed the sea.

The tide was almost full!

How could that be possible? It had been far out only minutes ago.

Voices drifted toward me from the rear—deep, guttural murmurings, distorted by the angled buildings. I felt cold: there was certain menace in the sounds.

Movement ahead made me jerk with shock. It was the figure. This time it waved to me. I was almost relieved. Other voices sounded from up the street. It must be the buildings which so distorted them. I was sure these people were converging on me.

The figure had entered a low corridor that led through a rotting gateway to one of the derelict cottages. There were no lights, no curtains. However, the smell of decay was even more powerful than that of the sea. Shadows hopped in the street behind me and moonlight gleamed on something jagged. There was evil purpose in that gathering.

I reached the doorway and went inside thankfully, closing the thick oak door, glad of its rusting bolt, which I slammed home. The figure waited before a worm-eaten table, the walls festooned with webs. This cottage had not seen proper use for decades. Moonlight seeped in through the smashed panes. Outside it had become as silent as a graveyard.

A match spat as the figure lit a candle. Our twin shadows danced for a moment. The face of the man was ancient, his skin like parchment, his eyes the eyes of the damned.

“You’re lookin’ fer Silas Waite.” It was a statement.

I nodded. I might have been standing before a corpse.

“I am he.”

Startled, I peered at the face. “You? You sent the card?”

“I’m yore father.”

It should have been an emotional, even sentimental jolt, that confrontation with this figure from the myths of my past, but I felt suddenly stupid, throat drying. How else could this old man know about the postcard?

“I’m Silas Waite. I came to fetch you, boy.”

There was no question of relief, no stirring of joy in me. I knew then that he could only be alien to me, as remote as my childhood. I could not even feel the clamminess of guilt. I chose words clumsily. “Are you... hiding?” I thought of the clandestine chase, these grim surroundings.

“Not here. I didn’t want to be seen in my old place.”

“But you do live in Appledore?”

“I haven’t been back for many, many years.” He spoke with a thick accent and it was only now that I recognised it. It was American, almost Puritan.

“But you can’t live here, in this hovel?”

“This will be my last night here, thanks to you, boy. Tonight I go free. Out to—” But he stopped, listening to something beyond the door. He seemed satisfied that it had been nothing. “I’ve done my share of trawling. Now I can rest. Earned my keep, my passage.”

“Back to America?” I said hesitantly, not understanding.

The old man screwed up his face. “Back? You’re already here, boy. You’ve crossed. I brought you over. Like I promised them I would.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I was angry now, confused by this nonsense. The old man’s mind was wandering, lost on one of his many voyages. Why in God’s name had I come?

“Innsmouth. You’re in Innsmouth.”

I had never heard of the place. “Look, can’t we go and talk? I’m staying in a pub. We can—”

“I don’t have much time. They’ll come for me soon enough. I can hear the breakers on the Reef.” A look of extraordinary longing crossed his face as he said this. “It’s your term now.”

Had he said term, or turn? “My turn? To what?”

“You’re my son. You’ll take my place, as I took my father’s. And when it’s over for you, when you’ve trawled your share for them, you can go back. Bring your own offspring. They won’t let you swim out to Devil Reef until you’ve delivered him.”

I could make no sense of it at all. The poor fellow had completely lost his mind. Who looked after him? He couldn’t possibly live here on his own.

“They’ll be here soon. I’ll go now.” Again he smiled that appalling smile of longing.

“Who? Who’s coming?”

“Dagon’s children. They’ll instruct you.”

He didn’t, after all, know me. I could have been anyone. And yet, the postcard. How had he found me? Had someone else put him up to it?

“Who is Dagon?” I asked.

He shuddered, but not with the cold. It was with an almost lascivious delight. Then he began murmuring something so obscure, so twisted, that I must have stared at him dumbly. Was he about to have a fit? His eyes rolled and as his mouth opened, I saw that his tongue was forked.

A clear knock sounded on the door I had bolted. I realised then that I had not shaken off the pursuit after all. There were at least a dozen people out there. And it was me they had come for.

“Serve them well,” said Silas Waite. My father? It had become increasingly more unlikely. There could be no ties between us. I could not bring myself to bridge that frightful gap. He reached out for me, but I wanted to shout my rejection.

As he stepped towards me, moonlight daubed his hands and wrists. They were scaled.

I lurched forward, thrusting at his chest and he tumbled back, taken completely unawares by my sudden turn of mood. I could hear the door being pummelled. Frantically I rushed past the falling Waite; his claws dragged at my legs but I was beyond his reach and out through a door behind him.

I was in almost total darkness, blundering through another room. Vaguely I made out some stairs, which seemed the only escape from this suddenly nightmarish hovel. I dived upwards. Behind me there was a splintering of rotting wood, the shouts of whoever it was that gave chase. Like hounds scenting blood, the inhabitants of this vile place were unquestionably after mine. I heard Waite scream something, possibly a curse, invoking that name, Dagon. I recalled it partly. An ancient god?

The stairs cracked under me and for a moment I almost lost my footing as a section collapsed. Yet I clung on to the wormy banister and hauled myself upwards. Below me, shapes writhed, the smell from the ground floor unbelievable. I could hear water, as if the tide had suddenly sloshed in to the rooms there. They tried to follow me, but the stairs wouldn’t bear their weight: more of the wood ripped away.

Moonlight again guided me. I crossed a filthy room to a window that had long since rotted out. There was no glass. Fear moved me now. I would do anything to get away from these lunatics. God alone knew what was going on in this place.

I scrambled on to the windowsill, reaching up for the gutter outside. It was strong enough to enable me to drag myself up and on to the roof tiles. Carefully I wriggled across them until I was able to cling to the brickwork of the chimneystack. I swung my legs up over the apex of the roof, pausing to get my breath back. The view that greeted me as I looked out over the town—for town it was—almost made me loosen my grip.

This was not Appledore. What had he called this place? Innsmouth? I could make no logical sense of my being here. The tide was full and I saw its leaping waves reaching for the first of the quayside houses. Beyond them there were others, already submerged, only their roofs and fallen chimneys visible.

But worse, there was some kind of reef out in the bay, lit up by an unnatural fire. And by that weird light I could see swarms of—what, seals?—crawling all over it. Yet as I looked more carefully, I could see similar shapes flopping out of the sea on to the quay beyond. They were not seals. If they had once been human, they were no longer.

Slates shattered beside me as something burst up through the roof. I stared in horror, realising that a skylight had been flung open. It crashed down on the roof, ripped from its hinges and went sliding over the guttering, hitting the courtyard below. A head and shoulders appeared through the hole: it was Silas Waite. But he, too, was animated by something beyond human understanding. His terrible eyes gazed into mine, no more than a few feet away. I lifted my foot, preparing to drive my heel into his face.

Just as something, a shred of guilt, perhaps, stopped me, so a shadow crossed his face and for an instant I caught a glimpse of the man beneath, Waite as he must once have been. He seemed to struggle with his inner demon, to be what he was. At last I felt a stab of sympathy for him.

Below him there were sounds, deep croaks and Waite cried as if someone had struck him, urging him on with his grim work. Again his scaled flesh reached out for me.

“Go with them!” he shrieked. “They won’t release me until you have taken my place! I can’t go to the Reef. Don’t let them deny me. Not after all these years! Go with them!”

I pressed myself back against the chimneystack. Some of its bricks were loose, but I clung on. Other people had gathered in the street below us, but mercifully the shadows hid them completely. I could hear them slithering about as though the tide had reached even this far into the town.

“Why must you go to the reef?” I asked him.

He had been trying to get on to the roof, but could only squirm in the narrow vent, caught like a fish on a rock. “Dagon’s children are there. They’ll welcome me. I’ve trawled for them for all these years. I’ll be one of them at last. Don’t deny me. Your turn will come”

It made no sense. He could see I wanted to escape him and made an even greater effort to get on to the roof. I pulled a brick loose from the chimney and held it up as a weapon.

“I don’t know how you brought me here, but you’d better show me the way back.” I reached forward and gripped his wrist, pinning it to the slates. Again our eyes locked. It was all I could do to stare at him, at the torment I saw in his face.

He snarled, clawing at me with his free hand and I smashed at it with the brick. Yet he clung on tenaciously, immune, it seemed, to physical pain.

The voices below grew in volume, in excitement. I had been seen. They meant to capture me. I had to get clear of this place or God alone knew what these lunatics meant to do.

Waite began to sob, pleading with me to go with them, tears streaming down his face. It only served to anger me. I raised the brick again. “Take me back!” I shouted at him. “Take me back, or I’ll—”

It came to me as I released a torrent of the vilest abuse I could dredge up from my fury that it was not the monster I ranted at, not this insane old man, but the ghost of the man who had deserted me all those years ago, the father I had never known. His crime. The loneliness of boyhood, the frustration, the sorrow of my mother, these were the things that goaded me now, pouring a livid power into the hand that held the brick. I swung it for a killing blow.

He must have read murder in my face and perhaps, at last, understood why. His inhumanity dissolved for a moment: I saw only a bewildered old man, searching for images from his own past. His eyes fastened on my face.

“Son...” he murmured.

“We must get away from this place,” I told him, the brick quivering between us. “Do you hear me?”

My fury must have cowed the beast that drove him, at least for a while. Dumbly he nodded. “Help me up.”

A change had come over him, yet I didn’t trust his moods. But only he could show me the way back to Appledore, through whatever bizarre gate had brought us here.

Slowly I dragged him up on to the roof with me. Something tried to follow, but I beat it back, tossing the brick at it and others I had dislodged. Waite bent over, more beast than man, but there was for a moment no suggestion of treachery. I gripped his arm.

“Follow the roofs. Find a way down,” I told him.

Nodding, he began the dangerous climb across the slate landscape. I followed, turning now and then to try and see if we were followed, but the inhabitants of Innsmouth appeared to have chosen another route to attempt our capture. Waite muttered to himself and though I couldn’t hear the words, they were not the peculiar sounds he had been uttering earlier. He was like a man unable to recover fully from a bad dream. I forced myself to pity him, suppress the murderous instinct that had welled up so horribly in me.

The houses were tightly packed and we must have travelled a number of streets before we finally found our way cut off by too wide a gap between roofs. We would have to go down. I could hear nothing in the black street below. But as we dropped on to a lower roof, we had to cling to the shadows. Someone was moving beneath us.

I watched in stupefaction as a grotesque procession emerged from a side street, trudging towards the quay and the strange waters beyond it. There were several beings, I can only call them that, leading this procession. They were hunched over, almost hopping and although I could not see their eyes clearly, they looked uncommonly wide. Moonlight gleamed on flesh that seemed slick, oiled like the scales of a fish.

These beings were terrible enough, but even more disturbing were the people with them. For they were men and women, presumably of this wretched town, their heads bent in misery, their footsteps sluggish, almost drugged. Twenty or more of them were being herded along, making no attempt to break free. With a start I realised where I had seen a similar procession before.

On faded black and white film. The concentration camps. The victims being led to their grim destinations. These people below me were in just such a predicament.

I gripped Waite again and must have ground his thin bones. “Who are they?” Something he had said earlier came back to me. About trawling. For what, people?

“No more,” he whispered. “I have done enough. I have bought my place on Devil Reef.”

I could not believe the implications of what he was saying. Instead we watched the procession disappear. Silence followed it. So far our pursuers had not found us out.

“You could stay here. Then, in the end, bring your own son when it is time for you to come to the reef” he murmured.

David? Was he telling me I should serve in this horrific place, freeing myself by bringing David here?

He looked at me miserably, the agony of the years breaking him. “It’s the only way. If I am to be free. Would you abandon your father to their eternal revenge?”

I clutched at his collar, wrenching it, almost choking him. “You would buy your life with my son’s! You want me to act as you did? Betray him?”

I could see the real beast tearing at him. It had nothing to do with this nightmare town. He had nurtured it himself, until it had fastened into him, a remorseless parasite. But I had woken it, that merciless guilt and I could see it now, eating into his guts. And I needed its fire to keep him moving, guiding me back.

“Take me back” I whispered to it, using it cruelly. He had forced me to choose. How easy it was to be brutal.

Inside him, the beast squirmed. It heard me.

We dropped down to the street, winding our way through stinking alleys, ankle-deep in seawater. I recognised none of the places. If anything, they were older and more derelict than those I had seen already.

But eventually we came to a street marked Fish Street and I knew it.

As we stood at the mouth of the narrow passage that led off from it to the steps, Waite hung back. “I can’t return. Have pity”

“You can’t stay here—”

“If I go back” he croaked, “I’ll not last. I’m Dagon’s. The sea there will wash me back to face them. No matter how long it takes, it’ll deliver me to him, alive. You go. And keep away from the sea, boy. It won’t forget you”

There were voices coming towards us once more, converging on this street.

“They won’t follow,” he said. “Only you and I can cross. It’s how I was able to serve—” But he stopped, cutting short a confession I didn’t want to hear. He, too, had come to a decision and I realised then that he must, after all, have been my father. Otherwise, why would he have abandoned his mad plan to trap me there? Our blood had triumphed over his dark god. “I’ll keep them off long enough,” he added.

I paused, then ran up the alley, closing my mind to his final revelation. But in the end it tipped the balance against him. He had known I needed a last push. I fled down the steps into the darkness. Behind me I heard the terrible voices of the hunt and the solitary shout of the trawlerman.

And so I went back to my own world. To the fishing village of Appledore, where, for all those years, my father had netted his unwary catch, the human diet for the dark god of his choice.

DOWN TO THE BOOTS

by D.F. LEWIS

THE FEN STANK of fish. The moonlit puddles stretched as far as her eyes could see, as she shuffled ponderously from her shanty house at the sodden side of the sea-strained lands. For years, the waves had not returned to within sight of her leaning roofs and staircase chimneystacks, as if they had been mopped up by the persnickety under God who had more common ground with a housewife washing the public pavements outside her suburban semi than with Madge... she just stopped and stared, balding broom in her hand, surrendering her heart as well as her hearth to the sluggish entropy of Earth’s curds and separates...

Madge leaned on the broom handle, just listening to the distant irregular pulse of the sea. The lighthouse, one luminous speck far out amid the other floaters in her eyes, tried in vain to keep rhythm with the natural bloodbeat of the Earth... it failed mainly because the beacon’s stokers had gone home for their breakfast in far-off Innsmouth Town.

Furthermore, she could just discern the pitiful drone of tuneless foghorns, as if even further out on the plane of her memories there lurked the blackened hulks of her various husbands’ fishing steamers, long exhausted of fuel as well as catch. The fishes’ flapping tails had in fact ceased their futile puddle-stirrings, ever since the seas withdrew in much panic during the Great Storm of ’87: none of the fish had managed to stay the dreadful surge and were merely beached around Madge’s shanty, like so many suffocating slimy insects, with salt gill tears.

Tonight, the moon was full: it revealed the herring-bones’ clicking as nothing but the fitful wind amid their teetering attempts to become one giant skeleton memorial of the One Fish Soul. Madge could not fathom the foghorns’ relentlessness. They made no sense, except, perhaps, the fog drifting with the moving air across the sea proper, was probably due to arrive here any minute, allowing the wind then to blow off to other more seasonable commitments inland.

Her husbands were all dead, except hopefully the latest one. And he had trudged off through the puddles even earlier that night. So early, he’d not even bothered to go to bed. He did not want to miss the tide, as so many of his predecessors had done before finally catching it late in their lives... and the tide’s beginnings were at the end of beach upon beach of hardening ribbed mud. His boots, on first leaving the shanty, had made loud sucking noises, the deep treads reaching even beyond Madge’s drowsing ears, into a dream where she could not find the ability to follow. Life’s pull was stronger. Waking was the magnetic north, draining her blood in sporadic spurts towards the poles of her death.

None of them come back. It was tantamount to a ritual, a delayed menstrual sacrificer which seemed as pointless as it was selfdestructive. Fishing, though, was in her husbands’ essence, more in the nature of hooking mouthless cancers from the swamp in the belly than God’s critters from the draining creeks of the sea lands.

As she stood at the shanty door, she managed to imagine the propeller-choked steamers upon the craters of churning brine that could still bear their floating hulks: the fly-rods spinning webs from deckrail to deckrail into a vast tangled cat’s cradle game she and her sister often fell out over in the olden days: the trailing nets flapping in their wake like so much living weed: the monsters deep down at the bottom of the involuted chimney-cores of dead volcanoes, their serrated backfins carving as far up as possible, in foolhardy attempts to return to the universe, to that huge space above the sky where they’d been created out of nothing but the mind-power of the master creature who stood above even God in the hierarchy of dreams...

Yes, they were nothing but dreams, Madge insisted. She stomped her foot, but lost it in the process beneath the mulch.

Then she saw them: her husband’s thigh boots stood out from the fen like the blackened stumps of Earth’s teeth, ill-pulled by a dentist God, Himself with a grin of decaying vampire fangs, each of these two death prongs liable to hurt Him more than his victim...

She shook herself. Dreaming again. They could not be his boots. But, if not, what were they?

That previous night, they’d spoken, perhaps for the last time. “Don’t forget to take your lunchbox, Owen... and your leggings are hanging up by the latchdoor.”

“I don’t want the leggings. The boots are quite enough—reaching to the crotch as they do.”

“But your most li-able parts will then be open to the soakings...”

“Did I ever tell you of my father? He said don’t be caught dead in your leggings, son, for people’ll think you were a nancy-boy...”

“What rubbish!” She bit her tongue.

“No, there’s something to that. There’s not enough time to be a belt-and-braces man. Life’s too thin for moithering...”

Unaccountably, tears had filled his eyes. But then she put it down to remembering his dad. Perhaps he’d left his own wife, in similar circumstances, to go fishing. There seemed no point in such an occupation, when the fishers themselves never came back... nor the fish with them. Only the stale bread would ever have to suffice, with no bony slimy innards to make two slices palatable enough.

She’d kissed him on the salt-stained lips for the first time, before retiring for the night, knowing he would sit up until it was time to go. How could anyone sit and do nothing? Her own thoughts were not sufficient to keep her going, without her hands doing something, like tatting, fishbone knitting, or baking stale bread: like making a start on the growing housework: but even such chores which seemed to multiply even as she slaved over them, could not staunch the fevering of her brain: she needed more: there was no rest inside her: she’d rather be dead than idle.

The dawn was slowly slipping up the side of the sky like a creamy yellow sea with clouds for waves. The moon had nowhere to hide, the land being flattened to the end of sight. Only the two tall boots stood up like sentries, betokening Owen’d become a ghost even before he’d left the catchment area of the shanty and before he got to the edge of the so-called sea: where his craft would still be bobbing at anchor, or beached upon the frozen ripples of the mud...

His leatherskin jacket-top smacks were lying beside the boots like a dead monster’s hide, its inner body gutted like a fish and gambolling off somewhere to fright another new widow with its kinship to a giant insect.

She whispered to her widowmaker’s ghost, in case it could hear: “I told you to take your leggings.” But that did not seem to make much sense: so she took the stubbled broom and proceeded to sweep up the endless puddles, as best she could in the circumstances.

THE CHURCH IN HIGH STREET

by RAMSEY CAMPBELL

...the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the inhabitants thereof...

—Abdul Alhazred,

Necronomicon

IF I HAD not been a victim of circumstances, I would never have gone to ancient Temphill. But I had very little money in those days, and when I recalled the invitation of a friend who lived in Temphill to become his secretary, I began to hope that this post—open some months before—might still be available. I knew that my friend would not easily find someone to stay with him long; not many would relish a stay in such a place of ill repute as Temphill.

Thinking thus, I gathered into a trunk what few belongings I had, loaded it into a small sports car which I had borrowed from another friend gone on a sea voyage, and drove out of London at an hour too early for the clamorous traffic of the city to have risen, away from the cell-like room where I had stayed in a tottering, blackened backstreet house.

I had heard much from my friend, Albert Young, about Temphill and the customs of that decaying Cotswold town where he had lived for months during his research into incredibly superstitious beliefs for a chapter in his forthcoming book on witchcraft and witchcraft lore. Not being superstitious myself, I was curious at the way in which apparently sane people seemed to avoid entering Temphill whenever possible—as reported by Young—not so much because they disliked the route, as because they were disturbed by the strange tales which constantly filtered out of the region.

Perhaps because I had been dwelling upon these tales, the country seemed to grow disquieting as I neared my destination. Instead of the gently undulating Cotswold hills, with villages and half-timbered thatched houses, the area was one of grim, brooding plains, sparsely habited, where the only vegetation was a grey, diseased grass and an infrequent bloated oak. A few places filled me with a strong unease— the path the road took beside a sluggish stream, for instance, where the reflection of the passing vehicle was oddly distorted by the green, scum-covered water; the diversion which forced me to take a route straight through the middle of a marsh, where trees closed overhead so that the ooze all around me could barely be seen; and the densely wooded hillside which rose almost vertically above the road at one point, with trees reaching toward the road like myriad gnarled hands, all wearing the aspect of a primeval forest.

Young had written often of certain things he had learned from reading in various antique volumes; he wrote of “a forgotten cycle of superstitious lore which would have been better unknown”; he mentioned strange and alien names, and toward the last of his letters—which had ceased to come some weeks before—he had hinted of actual worship of trans-spatial beings still practised in such towns as Camside, Brichester, Severnford, Goatswood and Temphill. In his very last letter he had written of a temple of “Yog-Sothoth” which existed conterminously with an actual church in Temphill where monstrous rituals had been performed. This eldritch temple had been, it was thought, the origin of the town’s name—a corruption of the original “Temple Hill”—which had been built around the hill-set church, where “gates,” if opened by now long-forgotten alien incantations, would gape to let elder demons pass from other spheres. There was a particularly hideous legend, he wrote, concerning the errand on which these demons came, but he forebore to recount this, at least until he had visited the alien temple’s Earthly location.

On my entrance into the first of Temphill’s archaic streets, I began to feel qualms about my impulsive action. If Young had meanwhile found a secretary, I would find it difficult, in my indigence, to return to London. I had hardly enough funds to find lodging here, and the hotel repelled me the moment I saw it in passing—with its leaning porch, the peeling bricks of the walls, and the decayed old men who stood in front of the porch and seemed to stare mindlessly at something beyond me as I drove by. The other sections of the town were not reassuring, either, particularly the steps which rose between green ruins of brick walls to the black steeple of a church among pallid gravestones.

The worst part of Temphill, however, seemed to be the south end. On Wood Street, which entered the town on the north-west side, and on Manor Street, where the forested hillside on the left of the first street ended, the houses were square stone buildings in fairly good repair; but around the blackened hotel at the centre of Temphill, the buildings were often greatly dilapidated, and the roof of one three-storey building—the lower floor of which was used as a shop, with a sign—POOLE’S GENERAL STORE—in the mud-spattered windows— had completely collapsed. Across the bridge beyond the central Market Square lay Cloth Street, and beyond the tall, uninhabited buildings of Wool Place at the end of it could be found South Street, where Young lived in a three-storey house which he had bought cheaply and been able to renovate.

The state of the buildings across the skeletal river bridge was even more disturbing than that of those on the north side. Bridge Lane’s grey warehouses soon gave way to gabled dwellings, often with broken windows and patchily unpainted fronts, but still inhabited. Here scattered unkempt children stared resignedly from dusty front steps or played in pools of orange mud on a patch of waste ground, while the older tenants sat in twilit rooms, and the atmosphere of the place depressed me as might a shade-inhabited city ruin.

I entered into South Street between two gabled three-storey houses. Number 11, Young’s house, was at the far end of the street. The sight of it, however, filled me with forebodings—for it was shuttered, and the door stood open, laced with cobwebs. I drove the car up the driveway at the side and got out. I crossed the grey, fungus-overgrown lawn and went up the steps. The door swung inward at my touch, opening upon a dimly-lit hall. My knocks and calls brought no answer, and I stood for a few moments undecided, hesitant to enter. There was a total absence of footprints anywhere on the dusty floor of the hall. Remembering that Young had written about conversations he had had with the owner of Number 8, across the road, I decided to apply to him for information about my friend.

I crossed the street to Number 8 and knocked on the door. It was opened almost immediately, though in such silence as to startle me. The owner of Number 8 was a tall man with white hair and luminously dark eyes. He wore a frayed tweed suit. But his most startling attribute was a singular air of antiquity, giving him the impression of having been left behind by some past age. He looked very much like my friend’s description of the pedantic John Clothier, a man possessed of an extraordinary amount of ancient knowledge.

When I introduced myself and told him that I was looking for Albert Young, he paled and was briefly hesitant before inviting me to enter his house, muttering that he knew where Albert Young had gone, but that I probably wouldn’t believe him. He led me down a dark hall into a large room lit only by an oil lamp in one corner. There he motioned me to a chair beside the fireplace. He got out his pipe, lit it, and sat down opposite me, beginning to talk with an abrupt rush.

“I took an oath to say nothing about this to anyone,” he said. “That’s why I could only warn Young to leave and keep away from— that place. He wouldn’t listen—and you won’t find him now. Don’t look so—it’s the truth! I’ll have to tell you more than I told him, or you’ll try to find him and find—something else. God knows what will happen to me now—once you’ve joined Them, you must never speak of their place to any outsider. But I can’t see another go the way Young went. I should let you go there—according to the oath—but They’ll take me sooner or later, anyway. You get away before it’s too late. Do you know the church in High Street?”

It took me some seconds to regain my composure enough to reply. “If you mean the one near the central square—yes, I know it.”

“It isn’t used—as a church, now,” Clothier went on. “But there were certain rites practised there long ago. They left their mark. Perhaps Young wrote you about the legend of the temple existing in the same place as the church, but in another dimension? Yes, I see by your expression that he did. But do you know that rites can still be used at the proper season to open the gates and let through those from the other side? It’s true. I’ve stood in that church myself and watched the gates open in the centre of empty air to show visions that made me shriek in horror. I’ve taken part in acts of worship that would drive the uninitiated insane. You see, Mr. Dodd, the majority of the people in Temphill still visit the church on the right nights.”

More than half convinced that Clothier’s mind was affected, I asked impatiently, “What does all this have to do with Young’s whereabouts?”

“It has everything to do with it,” Clothier continued. “I warned him not to go to the church, but he went one night in the same year when the Yule rite had been consummated, and They must have been watching when he got there. He was held in Temphill after that. They have a way of turning space back to a point—I can’t explain it. He couldn’t get away. He waited in that house for days before They came. I heard his screams—and saw the colour of the sky over the roof. They took him. That’s why you’ll never find him. And that’s why you’d better leave town altogether while there’s still time.”

“Did you look for him at the house?” I asked, incredulous.

“I wouldn’t go into that house for any reason whatever,” confessed Clothier. “Nor would anyone else. The house has become theirs now. They have taken him Outside—and who knows what hideous things may still lurk there?”

He got up to indicate that he had no more to say. I got to my feet, too, glad to escape the dimly-lit room and the house itself. Clothier ushered me to the door, and stood briefly at the threshold glancing fearfully up and down the street, as if he expected some dreadful visitation. Then he vanished inside his house without waiting to see where I went.

I crossed to Number 11. As I entered the curiously-shadowed hall, I remembered my friend’s account of his life here. It was in the lower part of the house that Young had been wont to peruse certain archaic and terrible volumes, to set down his notes concerning his discoveries, and to pursue sundry other researches. I found the room which had been his study without trouble; the desk covered with sheets of notepaper— the bookcases filled with leather- and skin-bound volumes—the incongruous desk-lamp—all these bespoke the room’s onetime use.

I brushed the thick dust from the desk and the chair beside it, and turned on the light. The glow was reassuring. I sat down and took up my friend’s papers. The stack which first fell under my eye bore the heading Corroborative Evidence, and the very first page was typical of the lot, as I soon discovered. It consisted of what seemed to be unrelated notes referring to the Mayan culture of Central America. The notes, unfortunately, seemed to be random and meaningless. Rain gods (water elementals?). Trunk-proboscis (ref. Old Ones). Kukulkan (Cthulhu?)—Such was their general tenor. Nevertheless, I persisted, and presently a hideously suggestive pattern became evident.

It began to appear that Young had been attempting to unify and correlate various cycles of legend with one central cycle, which was, if recurrent references were to be believed, far older than the human race. Whence Young’s information had been gathered if not from the antique volumes set around the walls of the room, I did not venture to guess. I pored for hours over Young’s synopsis of the monstrous and alien myth-cycle—the legends of how Cthulhu came from an indescribable milieu beyond the furthest bounds of this universe—of the polar civilisations and abominably unhuman races from black Yuggoth on the rim—of hideous Leng and its monastery-prisoned high priest who had to cover what should be its face—and of a multitude of blasphemies only rumoured to exist, save in certain forgotten places of the world. I read what Azathoth had resembled before that monstrous nuclear chaos had been bereft of mind and will—of many-featured Nyarlathotep—of shapes which the crawling chaos could assume, shapes which men have never before dared to relate—of how one might glimpse a dhole, and what one would see.

I was shocked to think that such hideous beliefs could be thought true in any corner of a sane world. Yet Young’s treatment of his material hinted that he, too, was not entirely sceptical concerning them.

I pushed aside a bulky stack of papers. In so doing, I dislodged the desk blotter, revealing a thin sheaf of notes headed ON THE LEGEND OF THE HIGH STREET CHURCH. Recalling Clothier’s warning, I drew it forth.

Two photographs were stapled to the first page. One was captioned SECTION OF TESSELLATED ROMAN PAVEMENT, GOATSWOOD, the other REPRODUCTION ENGRAVING P. 594 “NECRONOMICON.” The former represented a group of what seemed to be acolytes or hooded priests depositing a body before a squatting monster; the latter a representation of that creature in somewhat greater detail. The being itself was so hysterically alien as to be indescribable; it was a glistening, pallid oval, with no facial features whatsoever, except for a vertical, slit-like mouth, surrounded by a horny ridge. There were no visible members, but there was that which suggested that the creature could shape any organ at will. The creature was certainly only a product of some morbid artist’s diseased mind—but the pictures were nevertheless oddly disturbing.

The second page set forth in Young’s all too familiar script a local legend to the effect that Romans who had laid the Goatswood pavement had, in fact, practised decadent worship of some kind, and hinting that certain rites lingered in the customs of the more primitive present-day inhabitants of the area. There followed a paragraph translated from the Necronomicon:

The tomb-herd confer no benefits upon their worshippers. Their powers are few, for they can but disarrange space in small regions and make tangible that which cometh forth from the dead in other dimensions. They have power wherever the chants of Yog-Sothoth have been cried out at their seasons, and can draw to them those who will open their gates in the charnel-houses. They have no substance in this dimension, but enter Earthly tenants to feed through them while they await the time when the stars become fixed and the gate of infinite sides opens to free That Which Claws at the Barrier.

To this Young had appended some cryptic notes of his own—Cf. legends in Hungary, among aborigines Australia.—Clothier on High Church, Dec. 17, which impelled me to turn to Young’s diary, pushed aside in my eagerness to examine Young’s papers.

I turned the pages, glancing at entries which seemed to be unrelated to the subject I sought, until I came to the entry for December 17. More about the High Street Church legend from Clothier. He spoke of past days when it was a meeting-place for worshippers of morbid, alien gods. Subterranean tunnels supposedly burrowed down to onyx temples, etc. Rumours that all who crawled down those tunnels to worship were not human. References to passages to other spheres. So much, no more. This was scarcely illuminating. I pressed on through the diary.

Under date of December 23, I found a further reference: Christmas brought more legends to Clothier’s memory today. He said something about a curious Yule rite practised in the High Street Church— something to do with evoked beings in the buried necropolis beneath the church. Said it still happened on the eve of Christmas, but he had never actually seen it.

Next evening, according to Young’s account, he had gone to the church. A crowd had gathered on the steps leading off the street. They carried no light, but the scene was illuminated by floating globular objects which gave off a phosphorescence and floated away at my approach. I could not identify them. The crowd presently, realising I had not come to join them, threatened me and came for me. I fled. I was followed, but I could not be sure what followed me.

There was not another pertinent entry for several days. Then, under date of January 13, Young wrote: Clothier has finally confessed that he has been drawn into certain Temphill rites. He warned me to leave Temphill, said I must not visit the church in High Street after dark or I might awaken them, after which I might be visited—and not by people! His mind appears to be in the balance.

For nine months thereafter, no pertinent entry had been made. Then, on September 30, Young had written of his intention to visit the church in High Street that night, following which, on October 1, certain jottings, evidently written in great haste. What abnormalities— what cosmic perversions! Almost too monstrous for sanity! I cannot yet believe what I saw when I went down those onyx steps to the vaults— that herd of horrors!... I tried to leave Temphill, but all streets turn back to the church. Is my mind, too, going? Then, the following day, a desperate scrawl—I cannot seem to leave Temphill. All roads return to No. 11 today—the power of those from Outside. Perhaps Dodd can help. And then, finally, the frantic beginnings of a telegram set down under my name and address and evidently intended to be sent. COME TEMPHILL IMMEDIATELY. NEED YOUR HELP... There the writing ended in a line of ink running to the edge of the page, as if the writer had allowed his pen to be dragged off the paper.

Thereafter nothing more. Nothing save that Young was gone, vanished, and the only suggestion in his notes seemed to point to the church in High Street. Could he have gone there, found some concealed room, been trapped in it? I might yet then be the instrument of freeing him. Impulsively, I left the room and the house, went out to my car, and started away.

Turning right, I drove up South Street toward Wool Place. There were no other cars on the roads, and I did not notice the usual pavement loafers; curiously, too, the houses I passed were unlit, and the overgrown patch in the centre, guarded by its flaking railing and blanched in the light of the moon over the white gables, seemed desolate and disquieting. The decaying quarter of Cloth Street was even less inviting. Once or twice I seemed to see forms starting out of doorways I passed, but they were unclear, like the figments of a distorted imagination. Over all, the feeling of desolation was morbidly strong, particularly in the region of those dark alleys undulating between unlit, boarded houses. In High Street at last, the moon hung over the steeple of the hill-set church like some lunar diadem, and as I moved the car into a depression at the bottom of the steps the orb sank behind the black spire as if the church were dragging the satellite out of the sky.

As I climbed the steps, I saw that the walls around me had iron rails set into them and were made of rough stone, so pitted that beaded spiders’ webs glistened in the fissures, while the steps were covered with a slimy green moss which made climbing unpleasant. Denuded trees overhung the passage. The church itself was lit by the gibbous moon which swung high in the gulfs of space, and the tottering gravestones, overgrown with repulsively decaying vegetation, cast curious shadows over the fungus-strewn grass. Strangely, though the church was so manifestly unused, an air of habitation clung to it, and I entered it almost with the expectation of finding someone— caretaker or worshipper—beyond the door.

I had brought a flashlight with me to help me in my search of the nighted church, but a certain glow—a kind of iridescence—lay within its walls, as of moonlight reflected from the mullioned windows. I went down the central aisle, flashing my light into one row of pews after the other, but there was no evidence in the mounded dust that anyone had ever been there. Piles of yellowed hymnals squatted against a pillar like grotesque huddled shapes of crouching beings, long forsaken—here and there the pews were broken with age—and the air in that enclosed place was thick with a kind of charnel musk.

I came at last toward the altar and saw that the first pew on the left before the altar was tilted abnormally in my direction. I had noted earlier that several of the pews were angled with disuse, but now I saw that the floor beneath the first pew was also angled upward, revealing an unlit abyss below. I pushed the pew back all the way— for the second pew had been set at a suitably greater distance—thus exposing the black depths below the rectangular aperture. The flickering yellow glow from my flashlight disclosed a flight of steps, twisting down between dripping walls.

I hesitated at the edge of the abyss, flashing an uneasy glance around the darkened church. Then I began the descent, walking as quietly as possible. The only sound in the core-seeking passage was the dripping of water in the lightless area beyond the beam of my flashlight. Droplets of water gleamed at me from the walls as I spiralled downward, and crawling black things scuttled into crevices as though the light could destroy them. As my quest led me further into the earth, I noticed that the steps were no longer of stone, but of earth itself, out of which grew repulsively bloated, dappled fungi, and saw that the roof of the tunnel was disquietingly supported only by the flimsiest of arches.

How long I slithered under those uncertain arches I could not tell, but at last one of them became a grey tunnel over strangely-coloured steps, uneroded by time, the edges of which were still sharp, though the flight was discoloured with mud from the passage of feet from above. My flashlight showed that the curve of the descending steps had now become less pronounced, as if its terminus was near, and as I saw this I grew conscious of a mounting wave of uncertainty and disquiet. I paused once more and listened.

There was no sound from beneath, no sound from above. Pushing back the tension I felt, I hastened forward, slipped on a step, and rolled down the last few stairs to come up against a grotesque statue, life-size, leering blindly at me in the glow of my flashlight. It was but one of six in a row, opposite which was an identical, equally repulsive sextet, so wrought by the skill of some unknown sculptor as to seem terrifyingly real. I tore my gaze away, picked myself up, and flashed my light into the darkness before me.

Would that a merciful oblivion could wipe away forever what I saw there!—the rows of grey stone slabs reaching limitlessly away into darkness in claustrophobic aisles, on each of them shrouded corpses staring sightlessly at the ebon roof above. And nearby were archways marking the beginning of black winding staircases leading downward into inconceivable depths; sight of them filled me with an inexplicable chill superimposed upon my horror at the charnel vision before me. I shuddered away from the thought of searching among the slabs for Young’s remains—if he were there, and I felt intuitively that he lay somewhere among them. I tried to nerve myself to move forward, and was just timidly moving to enter the aisle at the entrance of which I stood, when a sudden sound paralysed me.

It was a whistling rising slowly out of the darkness before me, augmented presently by explosive sounds which seemed to increase in volume, as if the source of it were approaching. As I stared affrightedly at the point whence the sound seemed to rise, there came a prolonged explosion and the sudden glowing of a pale, sourceless green light, beginning as a circular illumination, hardly larger than a hand. Even as I strained my eyes at it, it vanished. In a few seconds, however, it reappeared, three times its previous diameter—and for one dreadful moment I glimpsed through it a hellish, alien landscape, as if I were looking through a window opening upon another, utterly foreign dimension! It blinked out even as I fell back—then returned with even greater brilliance—and I found myself gazing against my will upon a scene being seared indelibly on my memory.

It was a strange landscape dominated by a trembling star hanging in a sky across which drifted elliptical clouds. The star, which was the source of the green glowing, shed its light upon a landscape where great, black triangular rocks were scattered among vast metal buildings, globular in shape. Most of these seemed to be in ruins, for whole segmentary plates were torn from the lower walls, revealing twisted, peeling girders which had been partially melted by some unimaginable force. Ice glittered greenly in crevices of the girders, and great flakes of vermilion-tinted snow settled towards the ground or slanted through the cracks in the walls, drifting out of the depths of that black sky.

For but a few moments the scene held—then abruptly it sprang to life as horrible white, gelatinous shapes flopped across the landscape toward the forefront of the scene. I counted thirteen of them, and watched them—cold with terror—as they came forward to the edge of the opening—and across it, to flop hideously into the vault where I stood!

I backed toward the steps, and as in a dream saw those frightful shapes move upon the statues nearby, and watched the outlines of those statues blur and begin to move. Then, swiftly, one of those dreadful beings rolled and flopped toward me. I felt something cold as ice touch my ankle. I screamed—and a merciful unconsciousness carried me into my own night.

***

When I woke at last I found myself on the stones between two slabs some distance from the place on the steps where I had fallen—a horrible, bitter, furry taste in my mouth, my face hot with fever. How long I had lain unconscious I could not tell. My light lay where it had fallen, still glowing with enough illumination to permit a dim view of my surroundings. The green light was gone—the nightmarish opening had vanished. Had I but fainted at the nauseating odours, at the terrible suggestiveness of this charnel crypt? But the sight of a singularly frightening fungus in scattered patches on my clothing and on the floor—a fungus I had not seen before, dropped from what source I could not tell and about which I did not want to speculate— filled me with such awful dread that I started up, seized my light, and fled, plunging for the dark archway beyond the steps down which I had come into this eldritch pit.

I ran feverishly upward, frequently colliding with the wall and tripping on the steps and on obstacles which seemed to materialise out of the shadows. Somehow I reached the church. I fled down the central aisle, pushed open the creaking door, and raced down the shadowed steps to the car. I tugged frantically at the door before I remembered that I had locked the car. Then I tore at my pockets—in vain! The key-ring carrying all my keys was gone—lost in that hellish crypt I had so miraculously escaped. The car was useless to me— nothing would have induced me to return, to enter again the haunted church in High Street.

I abandoned it. I ran out into the street, bound for Wood Street and, beyond it, the next town—open country—any place but accursed Temphill. Down High Street, into Market Square, where the wan moonlight shared with one high lamp standard the only illumination, across the Square into Manor Street. In the distance lay the forests about Wood Street, beyond a curve, at the end of which Temphill would be left behind me. I raced down the nightmarish streets, heedless of the mists that began to rise and obscure the wooded country slopes that were my goal, the blurring of the landscape beyond the looming houses.

I ran blindly, wildly—but the hills of the open country came no nearer—and suddenly, horribly, I recognised the unlit intersections and dilapidated gables of Cloth Street—which should have been far behind me, on the other side of the river—and in a moment I found myself again in High Street, and there before me were the worn steps of that repellent church, with the car still before them! I tottered, clung to a roadside tree for a moment, my mind in chaos. Then I turned and started out again, sobbing with terror and dread, racing with pounding heart back to Market Square, back across the river, aware of a horrible vibration, a shocking, muted whistling sound I had come to know only too well, aware of fearful pursuit...

I failed to see the approaching car and had time only to throw myself backward so that the full force of its striking me was avoided. Even so, I was flung to the pavement and into blackness.

***

I woke in the hospital at Camside. A doctor returning to Camside through Temphill had been driving the car that struck me. He had taken me, unconscious and with a contusion and a broken arm, from that accursed city. He listened to my story, as much as I dared tell, and went to Temphill for my car. It could not be found. And he could find no one who had seen me or the car. Nor could he find books, papers, or diary at No. 11 South Street where Albert Young had lived. And of Clothier there was no trace—the owner of the adjacent house said he had been gone for a long time.

Perhaps they were right in telling me I had suffered a progressive hallucination. Perhaps it was an illusion, too, that I heard the doctors whispering when I was coming out of anaesthesia—whispering of the frantic way in which I had burst into the path of the car—and worse, of the strange fungus that clung to my clothes, even to my face at my lips, as if it grew there!

Perhaps. But can they explain how now, months afterward, though the very thought of Temphill fills me with loathing and dread, I feel myself irresistibly drawn to it, as if that accursed, haunted town were the mecca toward which I must make my way? I had begged them to confine me—to prison me—anything—and they only smile and try to soothe me and assure me that everything will “work itself out”— the glib, self-reassuring words that do not deceive me, the words that have a hollow sound against the magnet of Temphill and the ghostly whistling echoes that invade not only my dreams but my waking hours!

I will do what I must. Better death than that unspeakable horror...

***

Filed with the report of PC Villars on the disappearance of Richard Dodd, 9 Gayton Terrace, W.7. Manuscript in Dodd’s script, found in his room after his disappearance.

INNSMOUTH GOLD

by DAVID A. SUTTON

TALMAN GAVE ME a sceptical look. It wasn’t that he thought I was crazy, but maybe just a little nuts.

“Well, George,” he said at last, “I think you’ve been drinking too much of that sour-mash in the Kentucky sun!” I had been living south of the line for five years, that part was certainly true. As for the whiskey, I didn’t touch the stuff. Talman and I had been firm friends for around twenty years, a long relationship established through our mutual love of North American wildlife. We’d completed several expeditions together over the years on mainland America, and also once into the forested wilds of northern Canada. Eventually, my teaching commitments had meant a move of home, but luckily, or unluckily, as things worked out, half a decade on had found me back in my beloved Boston. The downside of that was I had no job and very little money.

We were sitting in the open basement of a bar near Charles Street in the Back Bay area, sipping cold beers. It was October, but the weather was mild and cloudy. The trees lining the sidewalk were beginning to transform themselves into fiery-crowned beacons of the season. I nodded to my companion, smiling. He was beginning to show his mid-forties age now with a greying hairline. Ignoring his quip about the bourbon I said, “Fred, do you remember the old days? We’d take off for the hills at the drop of a hat. At the merest sniff of something rare and interesting, with little more than fourth-hand evidence that we’d ever get to see the critter” I was, to put it mildly, selling my story.

“Agreed,” he replied. “We sure would race off in our younger days. But, you know, George, there ain’t never been any gluttons seen in New England. North of the Hudson Bay, or Labrador maybe, but not this far south. Those animals are rare”

He used the common name for the animal we had been discussing— the wolverine. And he was right, it was extremely uncommon and certainly not to be seen in Massachusetts. However, I was angling for some excuse to pay a visit to the wooded coast around Newburyport. So I pushed again: “I have it on good authority that wolverines have been seen around the state border with New Hampshire and I’d like to make this field trip if—”

“All right, George” He interrupted, sipping his beer. “I’ll loan you the two thousand dollars. That should cover your expenses. You can use my camping gear”

I was secretly overjoyed, but tried not to show too much emotion. “And what about the Toyota?” I knew George was too good a friend to let me down, but pushing like this I was asking for a kick in the ass. However, his 4WD was a second car and I was pretty sure he could spare it for a week or so.

He stared at me for a full minute then; his keen grey eyes—eyes that had sharpened their gaze over years of animal-watching—held me like a rabbit mesmerised by a weasel. My heart lurched and I thought he was going to renege on the whole deal.

He smiled. “And the Jap car. Okay, so I’m a complete fool!”

“You won’t regret it, Fred, I really appreciate what you’re doing. The money’s just a loan too, you’ll get that back, just as soon as I get my life straight” I was beginning to babble and I knew it. “Another beer?” I felt I could now splash out with my last few dollars.

“Sure,” he replied. “But I’ll get ’em.” When he’d ordered from the waitress, he said, “How about a little wager, George? Double or quits. If you see this damned wolverine and take a picture of it I’ll stand the loan. If you fail, you owe me four big ones.”

I could hardly refuse, even though I knew I was going to lose the bet. No one was going to see a wolverine that was outside a museum anywhere in the New England woods. However, I pretended to mull it over. We had been habitual betting buddies in the old days; fifty here, fifty there as to who’d see this bird or that snake first. My reply matched the role I was playing. “It’ll make me search all the harder, but I reckon my sources are unimpeachable. You’re on!”

Over the next few days, as I was getting my loan from Talman and equipping myself in his station wagon, the October weather began to worsen. The change was still only a chill in the air, letting everyone know winter was just around the corner. Finally, I set off from Talman’s house in the Boston suburbs. Till the end he thought I was on a wild goose chase to find the southernmost sighting of the world’s most vicious mammalian carnivore. If only he’d known...

In fact, my final destination was the salt marsh that surrounded the deserted town of Innsmouth. And it wasn’t any animal I was hunting.

It was gold.

You may think I was crazy, but let me fill in the gaps and you’ll see I was driven by the lure of gold fever; and maybe a little bit of the call of the wild.

***

Innsmouth is a coastal town—thriving once I suppose, but now deserted—on the mouth of the Manuxet river, between Ipswich and Newburyport. It is surrounded by a wide salt marsh on the landward side, a desolate and unpeopled place. During the 17th century a lot of the ancient woodland in the area was cut down, which allowed wind-blown sand to penetrate inland and this led to the creation of the morass. More recently, global warming has raised the sea level a few inches. It might not sound like much, but it has had the effect of making the wetland all the more permanent. Heavy forestation further inland adds to Innsmouth’s isolation, but that doesn’t matter, poor fishing over the last eighty-ninety years has left the town without sufficient industries to survive, hence the ghost town it’s now become.

I drove north off the Fitzgerald Expressway, along the coast on route 95 into wilder, pleasant country. Small, sleepy New England towns and radiant red and gold autumnal trees conveyed to me a sense of homeliness and safety. There ain’t a prettier sight than this State in the fall. Passing the turn-off for Arkham reminded me of the research I’d done there when first returning home from Middlesboro. That, and the things which an acquaintance had told me—Bill Poynter was a conspiracy buff and liked to delve into government records released through the Freedom of Information Act.

It was Poynter who first introduced me to the reason why I was so desperate to visit Innsmouth’s salt marsh. We’d been drinking pals in Middlesboro, since he and I worked for the same educational establishment. Naturally we talked a lot about our respective hobbies. His was digging for dirt and scandal in government papers. He told me one day about a major FBI raid on a little town called Innsmouth in 1928.

“The FBI cover-story was that the raid was to bring the bootleggers to justice” Poynter had said. “Innsmouth was a major centre for the production and traffic in illegal liquor. It was prohibition, after all”

“But,” I asked him, not really needing the mysterious prompting in his voice, “there was another reason for the raid, wasn’t there?”

“You said it. Geo—” he always shortened my name to sound like I was the prefix to some unmentioned Earth Science “—that raid had other fish to fry, at least for some of the senior Feds involved. It was, no less” he became conspiratorial, “to cream off a roomful of gold that lay for the taking at the town’s Obed Marsh Refinery.”

Poynter’s story didn’t sound too loony, although some of the other things I’d heard about Innsmouth did. Poynter went on to say that the Bureau people stashed their cache of gold somewhere in the marsh outside of town. And there it had remained to this day.

“Why hadn’t the agents gone back for their loot when the heat was off?” I asked him.

“Apparently there was a lot of fuss and palaver” he replied. “Seems, however, that they just couldn’t find where they’d hidden it, especially since agent Mahoney, the guy who knew the backwoods like the back of his hand, had inconveniently gotten himself shot dead in an unconnected raid in Boston a few months later.”

There arose in my mind half-a-dozen unanswered questions, so at the time I took Poynter’s story with a pinch of salt. However, I had since discovered that there was a gold refining plant in Innsmouth and that it produced some opulent, strange-looking jewellery. Its trademark appeared to be designs based on some South Sea island religion or motif. The reality of the gold factory clinched it for me. Innsmouth had died. Nobody lived there any more. The harvest of the sea had gone, depleted fish stocks turning the trawlermen inland for work; and before that, the gold which was spirited away destroyed Innsmouth’s other major industry. Maybe a few crooked FBI agents had used the liquor raid to cover their own illegal interest in Obed Marsh’s gold. Maybe that hoard still lay where it had been hidden in 1928. And maybe I could be a millionaire. It was too good a chance to pass up without at least one crack at it.

***

My drive up the coast was leisurely. I felt relaxed for the first time in months. I glanced in the rear-view mirror, and I saw that my face was looking better than it had for a long time. I’d always looked weatherbeaten, you’d expect that, but the last year or so had left me looking fifty rather than forty. But blue eyes were now keen, rather than dull; and the crow-feet around them and the sallow cheeks had almost gone. My blond hair was clean and tidy looking, instead of greasy and unkempt.

On the passenger seat lay the camera I’d bought. What I was searching for didn’t need photographing, but there was bound to be wildlife worth shooting in the woods. My destination was about sixty miles from Boston, but I felt so good that I drove slowly, stopping at places here and there, taking a few photos to familiarise myself with the autofocus Canon. A small township provided some typical New England buildings from the turn of the century and it reminded me of Arkham. I had stayed in Arkham for about a week last summer, sleeping rough for the latter half as my dwindling resources ran dangerously low. During researches at the library of the Miskatonic University, I built up a good picture of the annals of Innsmouth. That, in addition to what Poynter had told me, was all I needed to convince me about the bullion.

Innsmouth’s had its fair share of history. Besides the all-too-familiar story of the 1928 assault, which must have sounded the death-knell for the place, there were other strange stories. It was easy to see how such yarns began. My English ancestors came from legend-haunted Cornwall, where a dozen books wouldn’t be enough to document all the ghost stories of that county. Add the lost sunken city of Lyonesse and the mythic sea serpent, Morgawr, and you have a rich literature of tall tales. Let’s face it, any rural place like that has such folk stories. Innsmouth was no exception.

There was much supposition that the FBI foray was unrelated to the illicit distillation of whiskey (or gold for that matter), but organised to exterminate a brood of mutant humans living in the town and on Devil Reef, which lay a couple of miles offshore. The federal agents had dynamited the skerry, but my guess is that it provided a handy and secluded spot to moor the boats that were used to ship the liquor down the coast. Devil Reef is rarely seen nowadays, what with the rise in the sea level and the blasting, and it remains submerged except on occasional neap tides. Thus there was a blending of truth and fiction, an ideal mix to turn seekers after facts off the scent.

So absorbed was I in my thoughts that I nearly missed the turn-off. The old, rundown road was badly signposted and not often used. In fact, there were so many potholes in the blacktop that I was glad I was in a four-wheel drive. The road looped down, snaking into a wide valley that was all but hidden by a mixed forest. The trees and the undergrowth were making demands on the unkempt highway, encroaching, brooding over me as I drove slowly on. It was quiet, too. Unearthly quiet. All I could hear through the open window was the engine and the exhaust. I was tempted to switch on the radio, but didn’t. Finally, the road ran out of asphalt into a dirt track with coppery-leaved silver birches forming a tunnel above me. A few old tyre ruts were impressed into the dried mud, indicating that it had been some time since anyone had ventured this way.

The car bucked as it rode the uneven surface. What I was searching for was a disused railroad that at one time branched to Innsmouth from Rowley. It had been obsolete since before almost anyone could remember, and I surmised that the track, which had been laid on an embankment built across the marsh, was a likely contender as a site for the concealment of gold. My concentration was beginning to lapse, and suddenly the rightside front wheel hit a deep depression in the road. The wagon lurched sideways, coming to a stop and throwing me onto the passenger seat.

I cursed. The engine had cut out and the Toyota was tipped at a steep angle. It might be difficult to drive it out, but, as I surveyed my surroundings I noticed that the woods had become almost impenetrable for vehicles in any case. From now on I would have to move on foot. Heaving the rucksack on my back, I was again aware of the disquieting lack of birdsong. Anyhow, the first job was to scan the rather ancient map I’d bought from a bookstore along the way.

The storeowner had said that nothing much had changed in that part of the country since the cartographers last surveyed it. “There’s some bad weather ’spected,” he continued, as if I’d asked him for the forecast. “Jest on the radio, snow’s comin’ down aff the Green Mountains.”

“No problem,” I responded. “I’m an old hand in those sort of conditions.”

The old man pulled off his bi-focals resignedly, as though his dissuading tactics had failed, which they had. He stared at me with unfocused eyes before riding another snippet to deter me. “Innsmouth’s got... folks livin’ in them rundown houses as wouldn’t take kindly to strangers.”

“Oh?” I said, my surprise showing. “I thought the town was abandoned some years ago? In any case,” I continued, “I’m not interested in the town itself, I’m actually up here checking out the wildlife.”

He didn’t seem to take my meaning immediately because he said, “Yep, that’s right—they’re wild folks livin’ up there.”

“You mean like squatters, or hippies?” I asked.

“Mebbe.”

I’d left without really looking too closely at the map, but opening it now I saw that it was detailed, showing the extent of the forest and the few homesteads that were swallowed within it; the marsh and the old rail track. There was a fairly decent plan of Innsmouth as well, the coastline, the Manuxet river and Devil Reef. A cross indicating a church in the town was given the unwieldy title ESOTERIC ORDER OF DAGON CHURCH, and I remembered the name from my earlier researches. Apparently Innsmouth had gone over to some weird religion, I surmised something like the holy wailers or Mormons, or somesuch. Either way, it didn’t stop the town profiteering from their poteen. I found my route, marked it on the map and checked my bearings. Taking a quick look at a compass, I headed north, directly into the brush. It was hard work, the undergrowth of briars dense, clasping and tearing at my boots with every step. Serried stands of mountain ash, sugar maple and fir inhibited my progress for a while, finally opening up to thickets of mountain holly, chokeberry and cinnamon fern.

As the October daylight began to fade, I arrived at the margins of the marsh. With it went my cheerfulness. Above, grey clouds merged with a condensed, cold mist over the distant flat landscape. Drowned spruces, gaunt, skeletal, rose up out of the water like thin, many-digited, bony limbs. Quite a number of New England’s lowland swamps have been filled in with garbage, destroying unique environments, so for me it should have been a real pleasure to see Innsmouth’s bog still in existence. However, a chill ran through my body and my light mood became dark. Night was fast approaching and I could go no further that day. Besides, the swamp impeded my progress, the water level was so high. I would have to backtrack into the woods and trace a circuitous route, testing the marsh every now and then to see if there was some semi-solid ground which would carry me to the branch line.

I pitched my tent on terra firma in a clearing nearby and quickly switched on the lamp inside to banish the thickening shadows that surrounded me. After eating a simply-cooked meal and drinking a welcome hot mug of coffee, I took to my sleeping bag. As I lay there, basked by the comforting yellow glow that gaudily lit up my tent, I heard animal sounds for the first time that day. They were the boomings of frogs lurking in the bog laurel and sedges at the water’s edge. Aside from the usual croaks, there were some less familiar gratings, almost like a subdued barking. These low frequency resonances continued for some time and began to get on my nerves. I found it incredible that I, a former great outdoors man, should feel uneasy over a few amphibians.

I shivered, cold air fitting me like a vest inside the sleeping bag. The lamp flickered tentatively and the fabric above me flapped in a breeze. I trembled again, trying to shrug off the sensation I had of being observed. The temptation to scramble clear of my temporary shelter began to gnaw at my thoughts. I waited, listening to the frogs’ guttural conversations. I was almost becoming inured to the croaks and clicks when a loud splash nearby startled me. For all the world it was as though a large rock had been thrown into the swamp. There were no alligators in this part of the country that could have accounted for such a disturbance and the only other creature I could think of was a beaver, but they didn’t inhabit this district either. And somehow I couldn’t envisage a bear jumping into a swamp.

I sat, shivering, the sleeping-bag around my waist, my ears attuned to the slightest auditory clue. I slowly reached out and switched off the lamp. Black night fell upon me and my eyes tried to compensate by sending flares and sparks across my retina. I held my jaw hard shut to stop my teeth from chattering. The frogs had ceased their barking and I didn’t want to be the first to break the silence. I could imagine the fog outside sliding through the forest, lying like a heavy gas over the waters of the nearby swamp, hiding whatever had made that splash.

I didn’t want my presence to be known. If I sat still long enough, whatever was out there would, I hoped, move on. At that moment I could not imagine what kind of animal was roaming the woods and it left my imagination to run wild. I had never been so scared in all my life. If I didn’t believe in intuitive fear before, I certainly believed it that night.

It’s funny how terror is easily dissipated. When I woke the next morning, I was surprised that I had actually been able to fall asleep. Like in a dream, my terror of the previous night had faded clean away. Even so, the bizarre fables of Innsmouth’s past and the mutant strain of humans said to inhabit the place filled my thoughts as I awoke. Those legends, which I had skimped over in my local history research, lingered only as wild inventions in my mind and I couldn’t really remember the precise details. There was something about hideous transformations taking place over time, like a caterpillar into a butterfly, but in this case it would have been from the beautiful to the ugly. And something about Innsmouth’s throat-gagging fishy smell. Thinking about ichthyic stenches, I noticed a lingering aroma when I left my tent that morning. The coast was not many miles off, so I guessed that a waft of the seashore was being driven inland from a low tide that had exposed strands of seaweed. Or maybe the reef had been unveiled with its raft of weed and putrefying fish? Either way, the smell was definitely there and not as pleasant as you’d expect from a sea breeze.

***

I was making good progress and by midday found myself able to walk the boggy sphagnum and mud of the swamp. The locality I was tramping inclined gently upwards, rising out of the lying waters, and my boots gripped firmer ground every few hundred yards. Heading north-east now, I expected to see the railroad any time. Then, through a single file of bristling birches, I found the low embankment designating a straight line across country. My plan was to walk the track, right into Innsmouth if need be, taking it as slowly as necessary, searching for anything that might give a clue to the whereabouts of the stockpile of gold. My guess was, because of the wetland, the FBI men would have had to hide or bury their ill-gotten gains somewhere on solid ground, and the rampart before me was the only safe place that was well above the tidal sweep of the waters.

I started to plod along the weed-choked ties. Old bits of track iron, the clinker of fused ash, and other detritus littered the route. It had been exposed here for many years. There were no Coca-Cola cans or polystyrene fast-food containers like you’d expect. Nobody had walked this way in a long, long time. On either side of me the marshland swept away into methane mists, concealing all distant tracts of land.

A fine rain washed out of featureless grey skies, dampening my spirits, which had lightened for a short time after I’d stumbled across the railroad. I shrugged my rucksack higher on my shoulders, hunching beneath its weight, my eyes forever gazing towards the gravel, gleaming wetly under my boots. The tracks were shedding flakes of corroded metal and here and there brambles clawed across as though determined to hide forever its desolation.

For a time I imagined myself a hobo, one of a few individuals privy to the secret world of disused railroads, time-forgotten highways of steel, branching across country to distant ghost towns where loose-shuttered windows banged a tune to the shivering winds.

Permeating with the low-lying fog across the marshland, the film of rain brought sky down to meet tenuous earth as the swamp and the distant trees were swallowed up behind an opaque canescent shroud. I stopped for a time, and decided it might be useful to erect the tent here and use the location as a base from which to search the area. I could also rest with some shelter over my head until the rain eased a little. By 4:30 the light was fading and the drizzle had not let up. I called it a day and promised myself that tomorrow would see me intent on making significant distance towards the coast. By leaving the rucksack and provisions, I would be able to make better progress, with the knowledge that there would be dry shelter to crawl back into.

***

The next day I was up at dawn and felt refreshed. There’d been no disturbances in the night to unnerve me. As the sun slid slowly up behind veils of cloud on the eastern horizon, the distant lowlands of the marsh became more visible. The trees were sparser in the distance, giving way to coarse grasses and reeds, and clear, sunlit waterways cut sinuous routes through them. Here and there small islands rose out of the water, hummocks from which a few birches clung. And as the day became brighter, far off I thought I could see darkened buildings—the outskirts of Innsmouth. The railroad ahead of me turned a wide arc towards the right, and east, while on the left, away off, the land began to rise to a craggy headland. I could smell the distant sea, at least I thought it was that brine tang, but it was a strong, decaying odour, like rotting seaweed. Before long I realised the effluvium actually came from the salt marsh surrounding me. The water, where it could be seen between the reeds, was gummy and weed-choked, almost stagnant. I knew this would be an ideal place to observe waders and other birds whose habitat this was, but I could not concentrate on ornithology and didn’t even bother to take the camera with me.

I walked about six miles in bright sunshine, a cool breeze softening its warmth. Even so, the trek was making me sweat. I found no sign of where the gold might be hidden, no soil that looked as though it had been dug up, no markers to indicate a hiding place. I explored the whole area of the ridge on which the rail tracks were built, moving underbrush aside, poking into every hole. It was exhausting work. About two miles distant I saw where the track breached the town. Innsmouth’s buildings, those that were visible to me, reminded me of bones, their rotten timber roofs poking skywards like ribs. They looked like warehouses, old wooden structures. It appeared that I was destined to visit the town after all, when unexpectedly I came across a deep pit hollowed out of the side of the ridge. Funny thing was, the soil looked freshly excavated, the way you can tell if an animal’s den is still inhabited. I put it down to a washout caused by the recent downpour. Scrambling beneath the slope, mud and stones tumbling with me, I saw that the pit was even larger than it looked from above, and I should have realised that this could not have been the place where the gold was hidden. At the time though, everything else was forgotten. I had found the entrance to a cave which sloped under the railway above, deep into the earth.

Luckily, I had my flashlight with me and so without delay I stooped down and entered the cavern. It was like a burrow and very steep at first as it traced a route below the level of the bog. I marvelled that very little moisture was seeping through, although the stench of dead fish filled the air. The foetor was overpowering and I found it necessary to tie my handkerchief around my nose and mouth, but it hardly helped at all. The reek was so bad that the tunnel had to lead to Innsmouth’s beach. I wondered idly whether it filled up at high tide.

I felt the walls surrounding me and was surprised to find them solid, like petrified earth, and that no doubt accounted for the lack of swamp water leaching in. My immediate thoughts were of an undiscovered smuggler’s hideaway, but the cavern was too extensive for that and too far from the coast. Nothing about the place gave me a real clue as to its use or its construction. Further thoughts were interrupted when the beam from my flashlight bounced back from a dead end, a blockage of old, rotten-looking timbers. It appeared to be a very temporary and hastily erected structure, an impression that was reinforced by the water trickling between the cracks. Almost before I could consider my next move, a great wash of debris burst through the wooden wall.

I blinked in sudden shock for brief seconds before turning to flee the wall of dirt and water that plunged into the tunnel as if it consciously intended to engulf me. I ran for my life, my legs stretching as far and as fast as they could in the cramped space. I could hear the deadly slosh of water sluicing behind me, still coming at me despite the rising angle of the cave. I turned my head to see what chance I’d have of not drowning and thought I saw something swimming in that torrent, something big, with scaly skin. I screamed, believing a dead body was being washed along behind me. The notion that I was going to be buried with the rotting flesh of a human cadaver was a shock so powerful that it spurred me on; that and the dead white eyes, like bulging, unblinking frog eyes forced unnaturally into human sockets which glared at me out of the rush of water!

By the time I fell out of the entrance, my chest felt like a steam-engine ready to blow, but I didn’t stop there; I clawed with my hands and feet for higher ground, tearing at the stumps of grass for purchase. Behind me the noisome flood suddenly gushed out of the opening, swilling rapidly down the lower slope to join the no less rancid waters of the swamp. I looked back, but in all that debris, black water and stench, no dead body came floating out; it must have been lodged in the narrow confines of the cave. Finally the flow stopped. I was sitting, trying to gather my breath with raw gulps of air, my heart tripping, my eyes flooding their own stream down my cheeks as if to imitate the cataract. My hands were raw, ribboned with blood from the wicked barbs of the brambles I had grabbed in my flight. I had to return to my camp as fast as possible to treat the wounds, to dry off, and to let my terror subside.

It was quicker walking back since I plied a straight line. My ardour for the lost gold was unabated, but at that moment I doubted very much whether I would enter any other underground chamber ever again. The shock of seeing that bloated thing—I can only imagine it was a corpse long-pickled in the vile swamp water—was too much. Bad enough merely coming across a dead body, but to have one chasing you through underground floodwaters, that was something far, far more frightening.

I arrived exhausted at the camp as the third day was beginning to fade. Maybe I was too old for this sort of thing now. It was at that moment my heart received another thunderbolt—my tent had been half torn down. There was a series of long gashes in the side which flapped like a canvas claw. When I struggled inside of what was left I found that the lamp was smashed and that the food had been ransacked. As I gathered what equipment was salvageable, I began to feel cold. A flurry of snow was starting to blow across the landscape and with it an icy breeze. The sleeping bag was shredded and unusable. The tent offered no shelter. I only had some food in tins and fresh water that had survived in the backpack. I decided my best option was to make for Innsmouth. Besides the walk keeping me warm, I was bound to find shelter of some sort in one of the old buildings. Tomorrow I would have to retrace my steps to the car if only to re-supply myself with provisions.

***

As I set out, the snow was easing off, but the wind had picked up and was making an eerie whispering sound as it sighed through the bulrushes in the surrounding darkness. I was grateful that my flashlight was holding out as it allowed me to move fairly briskly along without stumbling. My head down against the wind, I jogged, following the monotony of the rail ties as they appeared one after another in the light’s beam. I almost failed to notice the buildings designating the outskirts of Innsmouth. In the near distance were those skeletal warehouses I’d seen earlier in the day, the wooden rafters poking at the sky, blackened, salt-weathered timbers like charred bones.

But it wasn’t the sight of the decrepit edifices I noticed so much as the lights which moved inside, stray shafts penetrating cracks in the walls and glowing strangely behind dirt-dark windows. My precipitate pace had slowed almost to a stop as I contemplated the scene before me. The gnarly bookshop man’s words, about there being people here, returned to haunt me and I shivered. My watch told me it was near midnight and the air felt very cold, but my gooseflesh was not altogether due to the temperature. It was the bizarre patterns of the lights that unnerved me, as though several people moved about within the otherwise darkened structure, in stealth and silence for some otherworldly reason.

I wiped snow flecks from my face and stood still, finally remembering to switch off the flashlight. In the intervening dark I heard odd sounds wafting up out of the wind’s rustling amongst the undergrowth. It was those damned frogs again, and their amphibious croakings and barkings. As my eyes became accustomed to the night, I could see that the nearest building squatted in the margins of the marsh, or maybe the water level had risen to half-drown it. Either way, it sagged into the viscous water as though it were being reclaimed by a slow but omniscient liquid deity. I crouched low, feeling very exposed on the high ground and with those feverish yellow beams of light pointing in my direction. I heard my breathing as a loud rasp, a counterpoint to the incredible croaking of the frogs. The muscle of my heart was crushing, pounding the blood through seemingly inoperable valves and my ears rang with this inner cacophony. My hands were trembling as the two great doors of the warehouse opened slowly outwards, their lower halves submerged, making the movement ponderous.

Within were the waving streams of light, though I was unable to make out their source or their reason, except that they emanated from beneath the water that formed an undulating floor within the building. This I noted in one brief moment, before all my attention was focused on the forms which emerged through the water, some of them swimming, some wading in the shallows towards me. I think I screamed then, and I turned to make desperate flight from that unholy spot. But God, those awful moments were like an eon, a time in which my eyes could not block out the sight of the shapes, flopping, wading, barking as they inexorably massed in my direction. I realised that the body in the cave had been neither dead nor human, at least not altogether Homo sapiens.

These monsters were some kind of batrachian animal or human deformities of the most terrible kind. Their skin the colour of slate or dead seaweed, mottled and coarse; their eyes bulging, dead fish orbs; their stink the most obnoxious, sickening pall of saline decay, which grew more overpowering as the creatures came closer. By the beams of light, my final clear view of them left me with one lasting impression: that these abortions from Hell were an insane remnant of the mutants that I had read about and so foolishly disbelieved in. A grim race of Deep Ones, sea beings who had mated with the inhabitants of Innsmouth. As I screamed and ran, the slapping of the demons’ feet behind me, and their hideous croaking, kept pace. If I tripped and fell, I’d surely be done for.

Those slimy, crested, amphibious abominations who chased me, they were old, past their time. Their breath at my back smelled of it and the texture of their skins bore the suggestion of the final stages of gangrenous flesh. I shattered the night with the torment of terror from my tortured larynx. But death was not the final revolting consummation I rushed from, trying to find power in the railroad; feeling the stones bite beneath my pounding feet, my torso leaning into the wind, leaning out of arms’ reach of the horde at my back.

No, death wasn’t the ultimate horror. For, while I had crouched and watched the last living remnants of Innsmouth’s abysmal evolution stream out of that shattered portal, I realised with a shock that all of the slippery, sub-human lifeforms—all of them—were female... If I hadn’t escaped that God-forsaken swamp... oh, Jesus, if those mephitic-ridden hags had ever taken me alive!

***

I wonder sometimes, worry even, for the next poor fool who will eventually enter that lost, forgotten town. He might not be so lucky as I. And Innsmouth might once more give birth, like a festering wound, like a sampling of Hell, and all the slithering forms of nightmare will come out of the fogs and mists to bear witness to a new and darker age...

CTHULHU

DAOINE DOMHAIN

by PETER TREMAYNE

HOW SHOULD I start? Do I have time to finish? Questions pour into my mind and remain unanswered, for they are unanswerable. But I must get something down on paper; at least make some attempt to warn people of the terrible dangers that lurk in the depths for mankind. How foolish and pitifully stupid a species we are, thinking that we are more intelligent than any other species, thinking that we are the “chosen” race. What arrogance—what ignorance! What infantile minds we have compared to... But I must begin as it began for me.

My name is Tom Hacket. My home is Rockport, Cape Ann, Massachusetts. My family history is fairly typical of this area of America. My great-grandparents arrived from County Cork, Ireland, to settle in Boston. My grandfather, Daniel, was born in Ireland but had come to America with his parents when only a few years old. Neither my father nor I ever had the desire to visit Ireland. We had no nostalgic yearnings, like some Irish-Americans, to visit the “old country.” We felt ourselves to be purely American. But grandfather Daniel... well, he is the mystery in our family. And if I were to ascribe a start to these curious events then I would say that the beginning was my grandfather.

Daniel Hacket had joined the United States Navy and served as a lieutenant on a destroyer. Sometime in the early spring of 1928, he went on leave to Ireland, leaving his wife and baby (my father) behind in Rockport. He never came back; nor did anyone in the family ever hear from him again. My grandmother, according to my father, always believed that he had been forcibly prevented from returning.

The US Navy took a more uncharitable line and posted him as a deserter. After grandmother died, my father expressed the opinion, contrary to his mother’s faith in Daniel Hacket’s fidelity, that his father had probably settled down with some colleen in Ireland under an assumed name. If the truth were known, he always felt bitter about the mysterious desertion of his father. However, the interesting thing was that my father never sold our house in Rockport; we never moved. And it was only towards the end of my father’s life that he revealed the promise he made to grandmother. She had refused to move away or sell up in the belief that one day Daniel Hacket would attempt to get in touch if he were able. She had made my father promise to keep the old house in the family for as long as he was able.

No one asked that promise of me. I inherited the old wooden colonial-style house, which stood on the headland near Cape Ann, when my father died of cancer. My mother had been dead for some years and, as I had no brothers or sisters, the lonely old house was all mine. I was working as a reporter for the Boston Herald and the house was no longer of interest to me. So I turned it over to a real estate agent thinking to use the money to get a better apartment in Boston itself.

I can’t recall now why I should have driven up to the house that particular week. Of course, I made several journeys to sort through three generations of family bric-a-brac which had to be cleared before any new owner set foot in the place. Maybe that was the reason.

I know it was a Tuesday afternoon and I was sifting through a cardboard box of photographs when the doorbell buzzed as someone pressed firmly against it.

The man who stood there was tall, lean with a crop of red-gold hair and a broad smile. I had the impression of handsomeness in spite of the fact that I noticed he wore an eye-patch over his right eye and, on closer inspection, his right shoulder seemed somewhat misshapen by a hump. When he spoke, it was obvious he was Irish. That did not make him stand out in itself for Boston is an Irish city. But he possessed a quaint old-world charm and courtesy which was unusual. And his one good eye was a sharp, bright orb of green.

“Is this the Hacket house?” he asked.

I affirmed it was.

“My name is Cichol O’Driscoll. I’m from Baltimore.”

“That’s a long journey, Mr. O’Driscoll,” I said politely, wondering what the man wanted. At the same time I was thinking that his first name, he pronounced it “Kik-ol,” was an odd one for an Irishman. “Did you fly up this morning?”

He gave a wry chuckle.

“Ah, no. Not Baltimore, Maryland, sir. But the place which gave it its name—Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland.”

It would have been churlish of me not to invite him in and offer him coffee, which he accepted.

“You are a Hacket, I presume?” he asked.

I introduced myself.

“Then I’m thinking that Mrs. Sheila Hacket no longer lives?”

“She was my grandmother. No. She has been dead these fifteen years past.”

“And what of her son, Johnny?”

I shrugged.

“My father. He died three weeks ago”

“Ah, then I am sorry for your troubles.”

“But what is this about?” I frowned.

“Little to tell,” he said in that curious Irish way of speaking English. “As I said, I am from Baltimore which is a small fishing port in the southwest of Ireland. A year ago I purchased an old croft on Inishdriscol, that is one of the islands that lie just off the coast, to the west from Baltimore. I am refurbishing it to make it into a holiday cottage. Well, one of my builders was pulling down a wall when he found some sort of secret cavity and in this cavity he came across an old oilskin pouch. Inside was a letter addressed to Mrs. Sheila Hacket at Rockport, Massachusetts, with a note that if she no longer lived then it should be handed to her son, Johnny. The letter was dated May 1st, 1928.”

I stared at the man in fascination.

“And you have come all this way to deliver a letter written sixty-three years ago?”

He chuckled, shaking his head.

“Not exactly. I have business in Boston. I own a small export business in Ireland. And so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, as they say. It is not a long run up here from Boston. In fact, I had to pass by to get to Newburyport where I also have business. I thought it would be fascinating if I could deliver the letter if Sheila or Johnny Hacket survived after all these years. But I didn’t really expect to find them. When the people in the local store told me the Hacket house still stood here, I was fairly surprised.”

He hesitated and then drew out the package and deposited it on the table. It was as he said, an old oilskin pouch, not very bulky. “Well, I guess you have a right to this.”

He stood up abruptly, with a glance at his wristwatch.

“I must be off.”

I was staring at the package.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Just a letter,” he replied.

“I mean, what’s in the letter?”

His face momentarily contorted in anger.

“I haven’t opened it. It’s not addressed to me” he said in annoyance.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I protested. “I didn’t mean to sound insulting. It’s just... well, don’t you want to know what it is you have brought?”

He shook his head.

“The letter is clearly addressed. It is not for me to examine the contents.”

“Then stay while I examine it,” I invited, feeling it was the least I could do to repay the man for bringing it such a distance.

He shook his head.

“I’m on my way to Newburyport. I’ve a cousin there.” He grinned again recovering his good humour. “It’s a small world.” He paused, then said: “I’ll be passing this way next week on my way back to Boston. Purely out of curiosity, I would like to know whether the letter contained something of interest. Maybe it’s part of some local history of our island Inishdriscol.”

“What does that mean?”

“Driscoll’s Island. The O’Driscolls were a powerful ruling clan in the area,” he responded proudly.

In fact, I arranged to meet Cichol O’Driscoll the next week in Boston because I had to return there to work on the following Monday morning. I watched him walk off down the drive for presumably he had left his car in the roadway. I remember thinking that it was odd to come across such old-world charm and courtesy. The man must have flown a couple of thousand miles and never once attempted to open the letter he had brought with him. I turned to where it lay on the kitchen table, picked it up and turned it over and over in my hands. It was only then that I suddenly realised the identity of the hand which had penned the address.

How stupid of me not to have realised before—but it is curious how slowly the mind can work at times. The date, the handwriting— which I had recently been looking at in the papers I had been sorting out—all pointed to the fact that here was a letter from my grandfather—Daniel Hacket.

With my hands suddenly shaky with excitement, I opened the oilskin and took out the yellowing envelope. Using a kitchen knife, I slit it open. I extracted several sheets of handwriting and laid them carefully on the flat surface of the table.

Inishdriscol,

near Baltimore,

County Cork,

Ireland.

April 30, 1928.

Dearest Sheila,

If you read these words you may conclude that I am no longer part of this world. Courage, my Sheila, for you will need it if these words reach you for I will require you to make them known so that the world may be warned. You must tell the Navy Department that they were not destroyed, that they still exist, watching, waiting, ready to take over... they have been waiting for countless millennia and soon, soon their time will come.

Today is the feast of Beltaine here. Yes, ancient customs still survive in this corner of the world. This is the feast day sacred to Bile, the old god of death, and I must go down into the abyss to face him. I do not think that I shall survive. That is why I am writing to you in the hope that, one day, this will find its way into your hands so that you may know and warn the world.

But first things first. Why did I come here?

As

you know, it was purely by chance. You will recall the extraordinary events at Innsmouth a few months ago? How agents of the Federal Government, working with the Navy Department, dynamited part of the old harbour? It was supposed to be a secret, but the fact of the destruction of the old seaport could not be kept from those who lived along the Massachusetts coast. In addition to that operation, I can tell you that my ship was one of several which were sent to depth-charge and torpedo the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. We were told it was merely some exercise, a war-game, but there was considerable scuttlebutt as to why the old harbour should be destroyed at the same time that the deeps were depth-charged. Some sailors conjured up visions of terrifying monsters which we were supposed to be destroying. There was talk of creatures—or beings who dwelt in the great depths—which had to be annihilated before they wiped out mankind. At the time, we officers treated these rumours and tales with humorous gusto.

When the operation was finished, and we returned to port, the officers and men who took part in the exercise were given an extraordinary four weeks’ leave; extraordinary for it was unprecedented to my knowledge of the service. I now realise that it was done for a purpose—to stop the men from talking about that strange exercise. The idea being, I suppose, that when they returned they would have forgotten the event and there would be no further speculation about it.

Well, four weeks’ leave was facing me. I had always wanted to see the place where I was born. Do you remember how you insisted that I go alone when it was discovered little Johnny had scarlet fever and, though out of danger, would not be able to make the trip to Ireland and you would not leave him? I was reluctant to go. Ah, would to God I had not done so. Would to God I had never set eyes on the coast of Ireland.

I took passage to Cork, landing at the attractive harbour of Cobh, and set out to Baltimore, where I had been born. The place is a small fishing port set in a wild and desolate country on the edge of the sea. It stands at the end of a remote road and attracts few visitors unless they have specific business there. The village clusters around an excellent harbour and on a rocky eminence above it is the O’Driscoll castle which, I was later told, has been in ruins since 1537. The only way to approach it is by a broad rock-cut stair. Incidentally, practically everyone in the town is called O’Driscoll for this was the heart of their clan lands. When the sun shines, the place has an extraordinary beauty. The harbour is frequently filled with fishing-boats and small sailing ships and there are many islands offshore.

On local advice I went up to the headland which they call the Beacon hereabouts. The road was narrow and passes between grey stone walls through open, stony country. From this headland there is a spectacular view of the islands. The locals call them “Carbery’s Hundred Isles.” Opposite is the biggest, Sherkin Island, on which stands the ruins of another O’Driscoll castle and those of a Franciscan friary, also destroyed in 1537. Beyond is Inis Cleire or Clear Island with its rising headland, Cape Clear, with yet another O’Driscoll castle called Dunanore, and four miles from the farthest tip of Cape Clear is the Fastnet Rock.

Everyone in the area speaks the Irish language, which has put me at a disadvantage and I now wish my parents had passed on their knowledge to me. All I have learnt is that Baltimore is merely an anglicisation of Baile an Tigh Móir—the town of the big house—and that some local people also call it Dún na Séad— the fort of jewels.

There was a certain hostility in the place, for it must be remembered that the War of Independence against England is not long past and that was followed with a bitter civil war which ended in 1923, only five years ago. Memories of that terrible time are still fresh in people’s minds and colour their attitude to strangers until they are able to judge whether the stranger means them harm or no.

Within a few days of arriving in Baltimore I found that I had not been born actually in the village but on one of the nearby islands called Inishdriscol, or Driscoll’s Island. I soon persuaded a fisherman to take me there, it being three miles from Baltimore harbour. It is a large enough island with a small village at one end and a schoolhouse at the other with its overall shape resembling the letter “T.”

I was able to hire a cottage close by the very one in which I had been born. The owners, Brennan told me, were away to America to seek their fortune. Brennan is the only one who speaks English on the island. He is a curious fellow combining local mayor, entrepreneur, head fisherman, counsellor... you name it and Brennan fits the role. Brennan is his first name, at least that is how I pronounce it, for he showed me the proper spelling of it which was written Bráonáin and the English of it is “sorrow.” Naturally, he is also an O’Driscoll and, for the first time, I learnt the meaning of the name which is correctly spelt

O hEidersceoil

and means “intermediary.” Names mean a great deal in this country. Our own name, Hacket, is—unfortunately—not well respected here for in 1631 two corsair galleys from Algiers sacked Baltimore, killed many of the inhabitants and carried off two hundred to be sold as slaves in Africa. They were guided through the channels to the town by a man called Hacket, who was eventually caught and hung in the city of Cork. Ah, if only I had knowledge of this language, how interesting these arbitrary signs we use would become.

In lieu of any other companion to converse with I have been much thrown together with Brennan and he has been my guide and escort on the island. Indeed I found no close relatives although most people knew of my family and several claimed distant kinship. After a while I settled down to a life of lazy fishing and walking.

It was after I had been on the island a few days that two more visitors arrived, but only for a few hours stay on the island. Brennan told me that one was some representative of the English Government and the other was an official of the Irish Government. Apparently, during the War of Independence, a number of English soldiers and officials had disappeared, unknown casualties of the conflict. It seems that there had been a small military post on the island.

A

captain, a sergeant and four men. One night, the captain disappeared. It was assumed that he had been caught by the local guerrillas, taken away and shot. All investigations had proved fruitless in discovering exactly how he had met his end. No one on the island had talked. Nor had the guerrillas, many of whom were now members of the Irish Government, issued any information on the subject. Now, nine years after the disappearance, the English Government, in cooperation with the Irish Free State Government, were attempting to close the case.

I met the English official while out walking one morning and we fell into conversation about the problem.

“Trouble is,” he said, “these damned natives are pretty close.”

He blandly ignored the fact that I had been born on the island and could, therefore, be classed as one of the “damned natives.”

“Nary a word can you get out of them. Damned code of silence, as bad as Sicilians.”

“You think the local people killed this Captain...?”

“Pfeiffer,” he supplied. “If they didn’t, I’m sure they know who did. Maybe it was a guerrilla unit from the mainland. There wasn’t much activity on the islands during the war although there was a lot of fighting in West Cork.

A

lot of bad blood, too. Political differences run deep. Take these people now... they don’t like the Irish Government official that I’m with.”

“Why not?”

“He represents the Free State. This area was solidly Republican during the Civil War. They lost, and they hate the Free State Government. I suppose they won’t tell us anything. Damned waste of time coming here.”

I nodded in sympathy with his task.

“Well, if you give me your card, perhaps if I hear anything... any drop of gossip which might help... I could drop you a line. You never know. They might talk to me whereas they would not talk to you.”

He smiled enthusiastically.

“That would be pretty sporting of you, lieutenant” (He pronounced it in the curious way that the English do as “left-tenant.”)

“When did your man disappear?”

“Nine years ago. Actually, exactly nine years ago on April the thirtieth” He paused. “You are staying at the pink-wash cottage near the point, aren’t you?”

I confirmed I was.

“Curiously, that’s where Captain Pfeiffer was billeted when he disappeared.”

The officials left the island later that day and I raised the subject with Brennan. I had been a little arrogant in assuming that because I had been born on the island, and was of an old island family, that I would be trusted any more than the officials from Dublin and London. I was an American, a stranger, and they certainly would not divulge the hidden secrets of the island to me. Brennan was diplomatic in answering my questions but the result was the same. No one was going to talk about the fate of the captain.

A

few days later, I had almost forgotten Pfeiffer. Brennan and I went out fishing. We were after sea trout,

breac,

as he called it. Brennan took me out in his skiff, at least I describe it as a skiff. He called it a

naomhóg,

a strange very light boat which was made of canvas, spread over a wooden frame and hardened by coatings of pitch and tar. Although frail, the craft was very manoeuvrable in the water and rode heavy seas with amazing dexterity.

A

mile or two from the island was a weird crooked rock which rose thirty or forty feet out of the sea. Brennan called it

camcarraig

and when I asked the meaning of the name he said it was simply “crooked rock.” Brennan reckoned the sea trout ran by here and into Roaring Water Bay, close by. So we rowed to within a few yards of the pounding surf, crashing like slow thunder against the weed-veined rock, and cast our lines.

The fishing went well for some time and we hauled a catch that we could not be ashamed of.

Suddenly, I cannot remember exactly how it happened, a dark shadow seemed to pass over us. I looked up immediately expecting a cloud to have covered the sun. Yet it was still high and shining down, though it was as if there were no light coming from it. Nor were there any clouds in the sky to account for the phenomenon. I turned to Brennan and found him on his knees in the bow of the boat, crouching forward, his eyes staring at the sea. It were then that I observed that the water around us had turned black, the sort of angry green blackness of a brooding sea just before the outbreak of a storm, discoloured by angry scudding clouds. Yet the sky was clear.

I felt the air, dank and chill, oppressive and damp against my body.

“What is it?” I demanded, my eyes searching for some explanation to the curious sensation.

Brennan had now grabbed at the oars and started to pull away from the crooked rock, back towards the distant island shore. His English had deserted him and he was rambling away in eloquent Irish and, despite his rowing, would now and then lift his hand to genuflect.

“Brennan,” I cried, “calm down. What are you saying?”

After some while, when we were well away from the crooked rock, and the sun was warm again on our bodies and the sea was once more the reflected blue of the sky, Brennan apologised.

“We were too near the rock,” he said. “There is an undercurrent there which is too strong for us.”

I frowned. That was not how it had seemed to me at all. I told him so but he dismissed me.

“I was only fearful that we would be swept into the current,” he said. “I merely offered up a little prayer.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It seemed a powerful long prayer,” I observed.

He grinned.

“Long prayers are better heard than short ones.”

I chuckled.

“And what was the prayer you said? In case I have need of it.”

“I merely said, ‘God between me and the Devil, nine times and nine times nine’.”

I was puzzled.

“Why nine? Wouldn’t seven be a luckier number?”

He looked amazed at what he obviously thought was my appalling ignorance.

“Seven? Seven is an unlucky number in these parts. It is the number nine which is sacred. In ancient times the week consisted of nine nights and nine days. Didn’t Cuchulainn have nine weapons, didn’t King Loegaire, when setting out to arrest St. Patrick, order nine chariots to be joined together according to the tradition of the gods? Wasn’t Queen Medb accompanied by nine chariots and...”

I held up my hand in pacification at his excited outburst.

“All right. I believe you” I smiled. “So the number nine is significant.”

He paused and his sea-green eyes rested on mine for several seconds and then he shrugged.

That evening I went to Tomás O’Driscoll’s croft which served as an inn, or rather a place where you could buy a drink and groceries from the mainland when they came in by the boat. The place is called a

sibin,

or shebeen, as it is pronounced in English, which signifies an unlicensed drinking house. Several of the old men of the island were gathered there and Brennan sat on a threelegged stool by the chimney-corner, smoking his pipe.

As

I have said, everyone looked up to Brennan as the spokesman for the island and the old men were seated around him talking volubly in Irish. I wished I could understand what they were saying.

Two words kept being repeated in this conversation, however.

Daoine Domhain.

To my ears it sounded like “dayn’ya dow’an.” Only when they noticed me did a silence fall on the company. I felt a strange uneasiness among them. Brennan was regarding me with a peculiar expression on his face which held a note of... well, it took me some time before I reasoned it... of sadness in it.

I offered to buy drinks for the company but Brennan shook his head.

“Have a drink on me and welcome,” he said. “It’s not for the likes of you to buy drinks for the likes of us.”

They seemed to behave strangely to me. I cannot put my finger on it for they were not unfriendly, nor did they stint in hospitality, yet there was something odd—as if they were regarding me as a curiosity, watching and waiting... yet for what?

I returned back to the croft early that evening and noted that the wind was blowing up from the south, across

camcarraig

and towards the headland on which the handful of cottages on the island clung precariously. Oddly, above the noise of the blustering wind, stirring the black, angry swells which boomed into Roaring Water Bay and smacked against the granite fortresses of the islands, I heard a whistling sound which seemed less like the noise of the wind and more like the lonely cry of some outcast animal, wailing in its isolation. So strong did the noise seem that I went to the door and stood listening to it just in case it was some animal’s distress cry. But eventually the noise was lost in the howl of the wind from the sea.

There is some ancient proverb, I forget how it goes. Something about “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...” I was reminded of that two days later when I happened to be fishing from the high point beyond my cottage, where the seas move restlessly towards the land from the

camcarraig.

It was a lazy day and the fish were not in a mood for taking the bait. Nonetheless I was content, relaxing, almost half asleep.

I was not aware of any presence until I heard a voice close to my ear say something in Irish. I blinked my eyes and turned to see a young girl of about nine years old, with amazing red-gold hair, which tumbled around her shoulders. She was an extraordinarily attractive child, with eyes of such a bright green colour they seemed unreal. She was staring at me solemnly. Her feet were bare and her dress was stained and torn, but she had a quiet dignity which sat oddly on the appearance of terrible poverty. Again she repeated her question.

I shook my head and replied in English, feeling stupid.

“Ah, it is a stranger you are.”

“Do you speak English?” I asked in amazement, having accepted Brennan as the only English-speaker on the island.

She did not answer my superfluous question for it was obvious she understood the language.

“The sea is brooding today” she said, nodding at the dark seas around

camcarraig.

“Surely the

Daoine Domhain

are angry. Their song was to be heard last night.”

“Dayn’ya dow’an?” I asked, trying to approximate the sounds of the words. It was the same expression which had been used in the shebeen a few nights ago. “What is that?”

“Musha, but they are the Fomorii, the dwellers beneath the sea. They were the evil-ones who dwelt in Ireland long before the coming of the Gael. Always they have battled for our souls, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. They are the terrible people... they have but a single eye and a single hand and a single foot. They are the terrible ones... the Deep Ones—the

Daoine Domhain.”

I smiled broadly at this folklore solemnly proclaimed by this young girl.

She caught my smile and frowned. Her face was suddenly serious.

“God between us and all evil, stranger, but it is not good to smile at the name of the Deep Ones.”

I assured her that I was not smiling at them. I asked her what her name was but she would not tell me. She turned to me and I saw an abrupt change in her expression. Abruptly a sadness grew in her eyes, and she turned and ran away. That left me disturbed. I wondered who her mother was because I felt I ought to go to the child’s parents in case they thought I had deliberately scared her. I should explain that I meant the child no harm in case she was afraid of something I had said or of some expression on my face.

I was packing my rods when Brennan came by. I greeted him, and my first question was about the child. He looked mighty puzzled and said that there was no child on the island who could speak English. When he perceived that I was annoyed because he doubted my word, he tried to placate me by saying that if I had seen such a child, then it must have come from another island or the mainland and was visiting.

He offered to walk back with me to my cottage and on the way I asked him: “Who exactly were the Fomorii?”

For a moment he looked disconcerted.

“My, but you are the one for picking up the ancient tales,” was his comment.

“Well?” I prompted, as it seemed he was going to say nothing further on the subject.

He shrugged.

“They are just an ancient legend, that’s all”

I was a little exasperated and he saw it for he then continued: “The name means the dwellers under the sea. They were a violent and misshapen people who represented the evil gods in ancient times. They were led by Balor of the Evil Eye and others of their race such as More and Cichol but their power on land was broken at the great battle at Magh Tuireadh when they suffered defeat by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the gods of goodness”

“Is that all?” I asked, disappointed at the tale.

Brennan raised a shoulder in an eloquent gesture.

“Is it not enough?” he asked good humouredly.

“Why are they called the Deep Ones?” I pressed.

A

frown passed across his brow.

“Who told you that?” his voice was waspish.

“Were you not talking about the Deep Ones in the shebeen the other night? Daynya Do’wan. Isn’t that the Irish for Deep Ones? And why should you be talking of ancient legends?”

He seemed to force a smile.

“You have the right of it,” he conceded. “We talk of ancient legends because they are part of us, of our heritage and our culture. And we call the Fomorii by this name because they dwell in the great deeps of the sea. No mystery in that.”

I nodded towards

camcarraig.

“And they are supposed to dwell near that rock?”

He hesitated, then said indifferently, “So legend goes. But a man like yourself does not want to dwell on our ancient tales and legends” It was as if he had excluded me from my ancestry, ignored the fact that I had been born on the island.

Then he would talk no more either about the girl or the Deep Ones—the Fomorii—or the

Daoine Domhain.

Two nights later as I was eating my supper in the main room of the tiny two roomed cottage, I felt a draught upon my face and glanced up. I was astonished, for there standing with her back to the door was the little girl. The first thought that filled my mind was how quietly she must have entered not to disturb me. Only the soft draught from the door, supposedly opening and shutting, had alerted me. Then I realised that it was curious for a young child to be out so late and visiting the cottage of a stranger. I knew the islanders were trusting people but this trust bordered on irresponsibility.

She was staring at me with the same sadness that I had seen in her eyes when she had left me on the cliff top.

“What is it?” I demanded. “Why are you here and who are you?” I recalled Brennan had claimed there was no such girl on the island. But this was no apparition.

“You have been chosen,” she whispered softly. “Beware the feast of the Fires of Bile, god of death. The intermediary will come for you then and take you to them. They are awaiting; nine years will have passed at the next feast. They wait every nine years for reparation. So be warned. You are the next chosen one”

My mouth opened in astonishment, not so much at what the girl was saying but at the words and phraseology which she used, for it was surely well beyond the ability of a nine-year-old to speak thus.

Abruptly as she came she went, turning, opening the door and running out into the dusk of the evening. I hastened to the door and peered into the gloom. There was no one within sight.

I have strong nerves, as well you know, but I felt a curious feeling of apprehension welling in me.

That night I was awakened by an odd wailing sound. At first I thought it was the noise of the wind across the mountain, whistling and calling, rising and falling. But then I realised it was not. It was surely some animal, lonely and outcast. The cry of a wolf, perhaps? But this was a bare rock of an island and surely no wolves could survive here? It went on for some time before it died away and I finally settled back to sleep.

The next morning I called by Tomás O’Driscoll’s place and found Brennan, as usual, seated in the little bar-room. Once again he refused to accept a drink from me and instead offered me a glass of whiskey.

“Brennan,” I said, my mind filled with the visit of the young child, “you are frugal with the truth because there is a little, redhaired girl living on this island. She can speak English”

His face whitened a little and he shook his head violently and demanded to know why I asked.

I told him and his face was ghastly. He genuflected and muttered something in Irish whereupon Tomás behind the bar replied sharply to him. Brennan seemed to relax and nodded, obviously in agreement at what Tomás had said.

“What’s going on here?” I asked harshly. “I insist that you tell me.”

Brennan glanced about as if seeking some avenue of escape.

I reached forward and grabbed him angrily by the shoulder.

“No need for hurt,” he whined.

“Then tell me,” I insisted firmly.

“She’s just a tinker girl. She and her family often come to the island to lift the salmon from the rock pool at the north end of the island. They must be there now. I swear I didn’t know the truth of it. But that’s who she is. Tinkers are not good people to be knowing. They say all manner of strange things and claim they have the second sight. I wouldn’t be trusting them.”

He looked down at his glass and would say no more.

All at once I had a firm desire to quit this island and these strange people with their weird superstitions and folk ways. I might have been born on the island but they were no longer my people, no longer part of me. I was an American and in America lay reality.

“Can I get a boat to the mainland, to Baltimore today, Brennan?” I asked.

He raised his eyes to mine and smiled sadly.

“Not today nor tomorrow, Mr. Hacket,” he replied softly.

“Why so?”

“Because this evening is May Day Eve. It’s one of our four main holidays.”

I was a little surprised.

“Do you celebrate Labour Day?”

Brennan shook his head.

“Oh, no. May Day and the evening before it is an ancient feastday in the old Celtic calendar stretching back before the coming of Christianity. We call it Bealtaine—the time of the Fires of Bile, one of the ancient gods.”

I felt suddenly very cold, recalling the words of the tinker child.

“Are you saying that tonight is the feast of the god of death?”

Brennan made an affirmative gesture.

The girl had warned me of the feast of the Fires of Bile when some intermediary would come for me and take me to... to them? Who were “them”? The Deep Ones, of course. The terrible Fomorii who dwelt beneath the seas.

I frowned at my thoughts. What was I doing? Was I accepting their legends and folklore? But I had been born on the island. It was my reality also, my legends and my folklore as much as it was their own. And was I suddenly accepting the girl’s second sight without question? Was I believing that she had come to warn me... about what? I must be going mad.

I stood there shaking my head in bewilderment.

I

was

going mad, even to credit anything so ridiculous.

“Have a drink, Mr. Hacket,” Brennan was saying. “Then you will be as right as ninepence.”

I stared at him for a moment. His words, an expression I had frequently heard in the area, triggered off a memory.

“Nine,” I said slowly. “Nine.”

Brennan frowned at me.

But suddenly I had become like a man possessed. Nine years ago to this day had Captain Pfeiffer disappeared from the very same cottage in which I was staying. The girl had said something about them waiting every nine years for reparation. Nine was the mystical number of the ancient Celts. The week was counted by nine nights and nine days and three weeks, the root number of nine, gave twenty-seven nights which was the unit of the month, related to the twenty-seven constellations of the lunar zodiac. Nine, nine, nine...! The number hammered into my mind.

Was I going crazy?

What was I saying? That every ninth year these people made some sacrifice to ancient pagan gods whom they believed dwelt in the depths of the sea—the

Daoine Domhain

—the Deep Ones? That the English army captain, Pfeiffer, had been so sacrificed nine years before, nine years ago on this very night?

I found Brennan looking at me sympathetically.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Hacket,” he said softly. “There is no joy in that. It does no good to question what cannot be understood.”

“When can I get a boat to the mainland?”

“After the feast is done.” He was apologetic but firm.

I turned and left the shebeen and began to walk towards the point.

Brennan followed me to the door for he called after me.

“There’s no fear in it. I’ll come along for you tonight. Tonight.”

I turned and strode through the village street and made my way to the north end of the island. I was determined to find the tinker child and demand some explanation. It was not a big place and eventually I came across a collection of dirty, rough-patched tents grouped in front of a smouldering turf fire at which a woman of indiscernible age was turning a large fish on a spit. There seemed no one else about.

I climbed down the rocks to get to the encampment which was sited on the beach; a fairly large strip of sand.

The woman, brown faced and weather beaten, clearly someone used to the outdoor life, watched me coming with narrowed eyes. There was suspicion on her features. She greeted me at first in Irish but when I returned the reply in English she smiled, her shoulders relaxed and she returned the greeting in kind.

“A grand day, sir. Are you staying on the island for the fishing then?”

“I am,” I replied.

“Ah. By your voice you would be American”

I confirmed that I was. I was looking about for some sign of the girl but there seemed no one but the woman, who, now I came to observe her more closely, resembled the child with her mass of red hair.

“My man is fishing,” the woman said, catching my wondering gaze.

“Ah,” I said in noncommittal tone. “And do you have a child?”

“My girl, Sheena, sir”

The suspicion was back in her eyes.

“I thought I saw her a while ago,” I said.

The woman shrugged.

“That you may.”

“Is it right that you have the gift of second sight?” I demanded abruptly.

The woman looked taken aback and studied me for several long seconds before replying.

“Some of us have. Is it a fortune that you are wanting?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be charging a shilling”

I reached in my pocket and handed over the coin which the woman took with alacrity.

“Is it your palm you wish read or shall I see what the tea-leaves say?”

I was about to reply when the flap of the tent moved and there stood the child. She regarded me with her large solemn, sad eyes and seemed to let out a sigh.

“He is the chosen one, mother. He has already been warned,” she said softly.

The woman stared from me to the child and back again. Her face was suddenly white and she threw the coin back at me as if it had suddenly burned her hands.

“Away from here, mister.” Her voice was sharp.

“But...”

“Have you no ears to hear with? Did you not hear what Sheena said? She is gifted with the second sight. She can see beyond the unseeable. If you value your soul, man, heed her warning. Now be away” She glanced about her, her face showing that she was badly frightened. “Sheena, find your father... we must leave this place now.”

Slowly I retreated, shaking my head in wonder. At least I had proved to myself that I was not hallucinating. The girl, Sheena, existed.

A

tinker girl with, supposedly, the gift of second sight, who gave me a warning...

I walked up to the point above my cottage and sat myself on a rock gazing out across the dark brooding sea towards

camcarraig.

What nightmare world had I landed in? Was I losing all sense of reason? Was I accepting shadows for reality? Did I really believe that the girl had some strange power to foresee evil and warn me about it? I was the chosen one. Chosen for what purpose? And what had really happened to Captain Pfeiffer nine years ago, nine years this very night?

I shivered slightly.

The sea was a mass of restless blackness and far away, as if from the direction of

camcarraig,

I heard the strange cry which had disturbed my slumber on the previous night; a soft, whistling wail of a soul in torment.

It was while I sat there listening that I recalled the words of the child.

“You have been chosen. Beware the feast of the Fires of Bile, god of death. The intermediary will come for you then and take you to them. They are waiting. Nine years will have passed at the next feast. They wait every nine years for reparation. So be warned. You are the next chosen.”

Abruptly I heard Brennan calling to me from the doorway of the shebeen.

“There’s no fear in it. I’ll come along for you tonight.”

Brennan O’Driscoll. O’Driscoll who had explained the meaning of the name

O hEidersceoil—

intermediary!

Brennan was the one who would take me to the Deep Ones!

I rose then and began to scour the island in search of a boat, any boat, any form of floating transportation to get me away from this crazy nightmare. But there was none. I was alone, isolated and imprisoned. Even the tinkers had apparently departed. I was left alone with the islanders.

Left alone to my fate.

That was this afternoon, my darling Sheila. Now it is dusk and I am writing this by the light of the storm lantern on the table in the tiny cottage. Soon Brennan O’Driscoll will come for me. Soon I shall know if I am truly crazy or whether there is some reality in this nightmare. It is my intention to take these pages and wrap them in my old oilskin pouch and hide them behind a loose brick in the chimney-breast of this cottage. In the hope that, should anything happen to me this evening, then, God willing, this letter will eventually reach your beloved hands or those of young Johnny, who may one day grow to manhood and come seeking word of his unfortunate father. Soon it will be dark and soon Brennan will come... The intermediary; intermediary between me and what? What is it waiting out there in the deep? Why do they demand reparation every nine years and reparation for what? God help me in my futility.

—Daniel Hacket.

Thus was the writing on the browning pages ended as if hurriedly. I sat for a while staring at those strange words and shaking my head in disbelief. What madness had seized my grandfather to write such a curious fantasy?

The wind was getting up and I could hear the seas roaring and crashing at the foot of the point where our house stood, gazing eastward towards the brooding Atlantic. The weather was dark and bleak for a late April day and I turned to switch on the light.

That something had disarranged my grandfather’s mind was obvious. Had he remained living on the island? Surely not, for the US Navy’s enquiries at the time would have discovered him. But if he had disappeared, why hadn’t the natives of this island, Inishdriscol, reported he was missing? Had he thrown himself into the sea while his mind had been so unbalanced and drowned, or what had taken place...? The questions flooded my thoughts.

I suddenly realised that he had written the curious document, which so clearly demonstrated his warped mental condition, exactly sixty-three years ago this very night. It was April 30. A childish voice echoed in my mind, reciting the nine times table—seven nines are sixty-three!

I shivered slightly and went to the window to gaze out at the blackness of the Atlantic spread before me. I could see the winking light from the point further down the coast which marked the passage to Innsmouth, and far out to sea I could just make out the pulsating warning sweep of the lighthouse at Devil Reef beyond which was sited one of the great deeps of the Atlantic. Deeps. The Deep Ones. What nonsense was that?

As I stood there, my mind in a whirl, staring out in the darkness beyond the cliff edge, I heard soft whistling, like a curious wind. It rose and fell with regular resonance like the call of some lonely outcast animal. It whistled and echoed across the sea with an uncanniness which caused me to shiver.

I pulled the curtains to and turned back into the room.

Well, the old-world Irishman had surely brought me an intrigung story. No wonder my grandfather had never returned. For some weird reason he had gone insane on that far distant Irish island and perhaps no one now would know the reason why.

I would have much to ask Cichol O’Driscoll when I saw him. Perhaps he could set forth an investigation when he returned to Baltimore in order to find out how my grandfather had died and why no one had notified my grandmother of either his death or his disappearance.

I frowned at some hidden memory and turned back to my grandfather’s manuscript.

“They were a violent misshapen people who represented the evil gods in ancient Ireland. They were led by Balor of the Evil Eye and others of the race such as More and Cichol...”

Cichol! With his one eye and hump-shaped back!

I could not suppress the shiver which tingled against my spine.

I tried to force a smile of cynicism.

Cichol O’Driscoll. O’Driscoll—the intermediary. April 30—the eve of the Bealtaine, the feast of the Fires of Bile. Seven times nine is sixty-three...

Daoine Domhain. The Deep Ones. “They wait every nine years for reparation.”

Then I knew that I would be seeing Cichol O’Driscoll again. Very soon.

Outside the wind was rising from the mysterious restless Atlantic swell, keening like a soul in torment. And through the wind came the whistling call of some lonely outcast animal.

A QUARTER TO THREE

by KIM NEWMAN

SOMETIMES THE NIGHTS get to you, right? When there’s no one pushing coins into it, the juke plays Peggy Lee over and over again. ‘Fever’. The finger-click backing track gets into your skull. Like a heartbeat, you’ve got it in there for the rest of your life. And in the off-season, which when you’re talking about the ’Mouth is—let’s face it—all year round, sometimes you go from midnight ’til dawn with no takers at all. Who can blame them: we serve paint stripper au lait and reinforced concrete crullers. When I first took the graveyard shift at Cap’n Cod’s 24-Hour Diner, I actually liked the idea of being paid (just) to stay up all night with no hassles. Maybe I’d get to finish Moby Dick before Professor Whipple could flunk me. Anyway, that’s not the way it worked out.

Two o’clock and not a human face in sight. And in late November, the beachfront picture window rattles in the slightest breeze. The waves were shattered noisily on the damn useless shingles. The ’Mouth isn’t a tourist spot, it’s a town-sized morgue that smells of fish. All I’d got for company was a giant cardboard cutout of the Cap’n, giving a scaly salute and a salty smile. He hasn’t got much of a face left, because he used to stand outside and get a good sloshing whenever the surf was up. I don’t know who he was in the first place— the current owner is a pop-eyed lardo called Murray Something who pays in smelly cash—but now he’s just a cutout ghost. I’d talk to him only I’d be worried that some night he’d talk right back.

It’s a theme diner, just like all the others up and down the coast. Nets on the ceiling, framed dead fish on the walls, Formica on the tables, and more sand on the floor than along the seashore. And it’s got a gurgling coffee machine that spits out the foulest brew you’ve ever tasted, and an array of food under glass that you’d swear doesn’t change from one month to the next. I was stuck in a groove again, like Peggy if I forget to nudge the juke in the middle of that verse about Pocahontas. It’s that damn chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’. I always trip over it, and it’s supposed to be the heart of the book.

I didn’t notice her until the music changed. Debbie Reynolds, singing ‘It Must Have Been Moonglow’. Jesus. She must have come in during one of my twenty-minute “blinks.” She was sitting up against the wall, by the juke, examining the counter. Young, maybe pretty, a few strands of blonde hair creeping out from under her scarf, and wearing a coat not designed for a pregnant woman. It had a belt that she probably couldn’t fasten. I’m in Eng. Lit. at MU, not pre-med, but I judged that she was just about ready to drop the kid. Maybe quints.

“Can I help you, Ma’am?” I asked. Murray likes me to call the mugs “sir” and “ma’am” not “buddy” and “doll” or “asshole” and “drudge.” It’s the only instruction he ever dished out.

She looked at me—big hazel eyes with too much red in them—but didn’t say anything. She looked tired, which isn’t surprising since it was the middle of the night and she was about to give birth to the Incredible Bulk.

“Coffee?” I suggested. “If you’re looking for a way to end it all, you could do worse. Cheaper than strychnine. Maybe you want ice cream and pickles?”

“That’s crap,” she said, and I realised that she really was young. If she weren’t pregnant, I’d have accused her of being up after her bedtime. Sixteen or seventeen, I guessed. Cheerleader-pretty, but with a few lines in there to show she had more to worry about than who’s dating Buddy-Bob Fullback these days or how she’ll get through the Home Ec. quiz next Friday. “About cravings, that’s crap. You don’t want to eat weird stuff. Me, I don’t want to eat at all, ever again. But you gotta, or you disintegrate. It’s like having a tapeworm. You eat as much as you can, but you still go hungry. The fo-etus gets all the goodies.”

Fo-etus. That was how she pronounced it. I kind of liked the sound of it.

“Well, what does your fo-etus fancy this morning?”

“A cheeseburger.”

“This is a fish place, Ma’am. No burgers. I can melt some cheese on a fishcake and give it to you in a bap.”

“Sounds like shit. I’ll have one, for the mutant...”

Julie London was on now, ‘Cry Me a River’. “Cryyyyy me a river, cuhry me a river, I cried a reever over you.” That has one of the best rhymes in the English language in it; “plebian” with “through with me an’... now you say you’re lonely...”

I slapped the frozen cake on the hotplate and dug out some not-too-senile cheese. We don’t stock the kind that’s better if it’s got mould on it.

“Have you got liquor?”

“Have you got ID?”

“Shit, how come you can get knocked up five years before you can have a drink in this state?”

The ice in the cake popped and hissed. Julie sounded brokenhearted in the background. It must be a tough life.

“I don’t make the rules.”

“I won’t get drunk. The fo-etus will.”

“He’s underage too, Ma’am.”

“It’s an it. They did tests.”

“Pardon?”

“Ginger ale...”

“Fine.”

“...and put a shot of something in it.”

I gave in and dug out the scotch. Not much call for it. The highlander on the label had faded, a yellowing dribble down his face turning him leprous. I splashed the bottom of a glass, then added a full measure of soft drink. She had it down quickly and ordered another. I saw to it and flipped the cake over. I wish I could say it smelled appetising.

“I’m not married,” she said. “I had to leave school. There goes my shot at college. Probably my only chance to get out of the ’Mouth. Oh well, that’s another life on the rocks. You must get a lot of that.”

“Not really. I don’t get much of anyone in here. I think the Cap’n will be dropping the 24-Hour service next year. All his old customers drowned or something. It’s entropy. Everything’s winding down. You have to expect it.”

I melted the cheese and handed her her cheesefish bap. She didn’t seem interested in it. I noticed she had a pile of quarters stacked in a little tower on the bar. She was feeding the juke regularly.

“This is my song,” she said. Rosemary Clooney, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’. “The bastard certainly did.”

She was a talker, I’d spotted that early. After midnight, you only get talkers and brooders. I didn’t really have to say anything, but there’d be pauses if I didn’t fill in the gaps.

“Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Fuckin’ amphibian. He’s supposed to be here. I’m meeting him.”

“What’ll happen?”

“Who knows. Some folks ain’t human.”

She pushed her plate around and prodded the bap. I had to agree with her. I wouldn’t have eaten it, either. Murray never asked me if I could cook.

“Look, the lights...” She meant the sea lights. It’s a localised phenomenon in the ’Mouth. A greenish glow just out beyond the shallows. Everyone freaks first time they see it. “He’ll be here soon. Another ginger ale plus.”

I gave her one. She took it slower. Captain Ahab looked insanely up from the broken-spined paperback on the counter, obsessed with his white whale. Crazy bastard. I’d love to see him on a talk show with one of those Greenpeace activists.

There was someone coming up from the beach. She shifted on her stool, uncomfortably keeping her pregnancy away from the rim of the counter. She didn’t seem interested one way or the other. “It’s him.”

“He’ll be wet.”

“Yeah. That he will.”

“It don’t matter. I don’t do the mopping up. That’s the kid who gets the daytime haul.”

It was Sinatra now. The main man. “It’s a quarter to three...”

“No one in the place except you and me,” I said, over the Chairman of the Board. Her smile was cracked, lopsided, greenish. She had plaque.

The door was pushed inward, and in he waddled. As you might expect, he didn’t look like much. It took him a long time to get across the diner, and he wasn’t breathing easily. He moved a bit like Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, dragging wetly. It was easy to see what she had seen in him; it left a thin damp trail between his scuffed footprints. By the time he got to the counter, she had finished her drink.

He got up onto a stool with difficulty, his wet, leather-linked fingers scrabbling for a grip on the edge of the bar. The skin over his cheeks and neck puffed in and out as he tried to smile at her.

“...could tell you a lot,” sung Frankie, “but you’ve got to be true to your code...” She put her glass down, and looked me in the eye, smiling. “Make it one for my baby, and one more for the toad.”

THE TOMB OF PRISCUS

by BRIAN MOONEY

FATHER SHEA! IT’S that Professor Calloway!”

My housekeeper, a widow from County Offaly, offered the telephone reluctantly, as if afraid that its touch would taint. Mrs. Byrne is a good soul but she disapproves of Calloway. She believes that he tempts me into bad ways.

“Roderick.” Calloway’s voice was abrupt. “Come on over. I’ve something to show you.” He hung up before I could answer.

During the course of—and, it must be said, because of—my long friendship with Professor Reuben Calloway, I have been involved in some bizarre and frightening experiences. The end result of this telephone call was to be the fearful tragedy at Lower Benhoe.

The morning was fine and held portent of a good summer. I was at a loose end and the drive to Southdown University would be a pleasant one, so I shrugged at Mrs. Byrne and went to find my jacket. The roads were fairly clear and the journey did not take long. Leaving my shoddy Land Rover in the visitors’ car park, I walked through the main quadrangle, warm in the sunshine and bordered by clumps of daffodils and other spring flowers, into the mellow brick building graced with high-mullioned windows and then along a wood-panelled hall until I came to my friend’s study. I gave a brief knock and entered.

As always, the room was a clutter of papers, books and periodicals heaped haphazardly over the furniture and floor. On a timeworn antique side-table rested a black Royal typewriter, itself almost a museum piece, with a partly-completed sheet of A4 Bond jutting from its platen. The windows were tightly sealed, the central heating turned high and the place reeked with the stale smell of Turkish tobacco. Calloway glanced up from a notebook and laid aside the fountain pen with which he had been making an entry.

He removed the gold-rimmed half-spectacles which he wore for reading and writing. “Ah, Roderick, there you are,” he grunted as if I had only been into the next-door office for a few moments rather than not having seen him for several months. “I thought you might appreciate an odd coincidence.”

We have been friends for many years, so I did not take offence at Calloway’s manner. Moving a pile of dog-eared essays from a chair, I sat opposite him and waited.

After making several additional notations in his book, he said, “Have a look at that while I pour you a coffee.” He flicked a sepia-tinted photograph across his desk to me. “Strong, black, no sugar, right?”

“Fine, thanks.” I took one brief look at the photograph and could feel my lip curling with distaste. “It’s... profane,” I said, casting it down.

“Yes, yes,” muttered Calloway, his tone impatient. “By our Christian standards, perhaps. But suspend prejudice, Roderick, suspend prejudice and take another look.” He placed a cup at my elbow.

I retrieved the print and studied it. It was old and creased, overexposed and badly faded, and yet somehow it remained powerfully disturbing. It showed a crucifixion. But not the holy one.

Calloway handed me a large magnifying glass. “This might help.” The crucifix itself was not the symbolic cross of Christianity but rather the true T-form favoured by the Romans. There was a bulky thing hanging from the horizontal bar, gross head slumped upon a barrel chest. I say thing deliberately; the age and condition of the photograph made the nature of the victim uncertain, there being both human and non-human aspects to that tortured form. After careful scrutiny of the head, the angle of which almost hid the features, I concluded that it was vaguely amphibian and I said so.

“It’s statuary, I take it,” was my comment. “Some piece of Satanic impedimenta?”

Calloway shook his head as he lit a Turkish cigarette. “Far from it,” he said. “That photograph was taken from the life. Or, to be more accurate, from the death.”

“Some unfortunate animal sacrificed at a Black Mass, then?”

“No,” replied Calloway. “You see there an Innsmouth hybrid. The photograph came from the archives of the American FBI. I take it that you’ve never heard of Innsmouth?”

When I shook my head he continued, “Little wonder, really. You won’t find it listed in any tourist guide, nor in any atlas. It’s neither a place nor a history that the American authorities have any pride in. In fact, they did their best to wipe a chunk of Innsmouth from the map, although they were not entirely successful.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and took a sip of coffee. “Innsmouth is a small port in Massachusetts. The story, as slowly pieced together by interested parties, is this: many years ago, certainly long before the American Civil War, Innsmouth seafarers began to trade with a peculiar race of Pacific islanders. It transpired that these islanders had been interbreeding with... something else, something inhuman, something from the ocean depths.”

“It’s supposed to be impossible for different species to interbreed,” I interrupted.

Calloway held up a big hand to still my protest. “Perhaps in the normal course of nature,” he said. “But we are not talking of normality here. Anyway, in time some of the Innsmouth people located an Atlantic colony of these sea things and began to interbreed in their turn. The resulting hybrids, at birth, were human, or near enough to human as to make no difference. However, around about middle life they would begin to change, firstly into what you see in that photograph... and then into something much worse.”

Calloway hauled himself from his large swivel chair and waddled to the window, to stand staring out across the sunlit campus. “In the past, Roderick, you have heard me allude to the so-called Ancient Ones.” He turned, pointing to the photograph. “Beings such as the Innsmouth creatures are worshippers and servants of those terrible old gods. I won’t tell you of their rituals other than to say that they are vile beyond imagination.”

He returned to his desk, reaching for his cigarette case. “Sometime in the late twenties, the Federal authorities got wind of what was happening at Innsmouth and agents were despatched to deal with the situation. They were ruthless but not quite thorough. Many Innsmouth dwellers escaped.

“A number of them went into the sea, an environment to which the physical change particularly suited them. Others were not fully metamorphosed and the sea was therefore effectively barred to them as sanctuary. Some sought refuge inland. The thing in the picture was caught by a band of farmers, who held a lynching party. The Innsmouth people were not popular with their near neighbours.”

“Lynching is wicked in any circumstances,” I said. “But crucifixion... why, that’s even more barbaric than hanging or shooting.”

“For all that they were living in the 20th century, the people in that part of Massachusetts were a very superstitious lot,” Calloway said. “The area had been recognised as a hotbed of witchcraft and black magic for very many years. A lot of locals had a peasant wisdom about how to deal with the abnormal. I think that the lynch mob guessed crucifixion would be far more efficacious than hanging. And after the picture was taken, the corpse was incinerated.

“The intention was to ensure complete destruction. There was no attempt to conceal the killing. The farmers were quite open with the federals about what had happened and handed over the photograph without quibble. The press got wind of it, but unlike the authorities they got short shrift from the lynchers. New Englanders tend to be close-mouthed, even today; back then the preponderance of strange events on their homeground tended to reinforce rather than relax their natural reticence.

“That photograph is the sole remaining evidence and it exists only because somebody filched it from the records before they were destroyed as part of a general cover-up. It was sent to me by an American colleague who knows of my interest in such matters.”

“I assume that the authorities did nothing about the lynching?” I asked.

Calloway shook his head, fleshy jowls wobbling. “Why should they? The locals had only done what the government was bent on doing—a little more brutally, perhaps, but to the same end. Well, Roderick, you must be wondering what all this is leading to?”

I nodded. “You mentioned a coincidence,” I reminded him.

With a smug grin, Calloway pushed three more photographs towards me. This time they were coloured Polaroid prints.

The first was of a low stone portal, deep set into what looked like an earthen tunnel. The camera, probably a simple one, had been held some distance from the doorway, and while I could make out that there were vague shapes upon the jambs and indistinct marks upon the lintel, even with the magnifying-glass they were not clear.

The second and third Polaroids showed the opposing jambs. Each had an identical relief carving, depicting a crucifixion very similar to that shown in the American photograph. In both carvings, something undoubtedly batrachian was portrayed. Bulging eyes stared straight forward, great loose mouths twisted in sneering hatred.

“I’m hooked,” I said. “Tell me more.”

“These creatures, these ‘Deep Ones’ as they have sometimes been called, are incredibly ancient,” said Calloway. “There is evidence that throughout history various races have had some contact with them. Sumerian and first dynasty Egyptian priests certainly knew of them, as did the Chinese of the Hsai and Shang dynasties.”

“But you’re talking of periods of—what?—between five and six thousand years ago!”

Calloway shrugged. “I have seen artefacts which suggest that our palaeolithic ancestors knew of the Deep Ones. They could well antedate mankind.”

He went to light another cigarette and with a muttered imprecation hurled an empty matchbox at an already overflowing waste-basket. There was a pause while he scrabbled through desk drawers. At last he found a fresh box and relaxed. “Generally, Roderick, these beings have shunned the human race, not through fear but because they can afford to await the return of their hideous gods. They have a longevity beyond our ken, and they limit their contact with mankind to those who worship them.” Calloway rose to refill my coffee cup. As he poured he said, “Those Polaroids were taken a couple of days ago, at an archaeological dig a few miles from Hastings, and I received them first post today.” He set down the fresh coffee and took a sheet of paper from the jumble on his desk. “This letter was with them.” The paper was cheap, obviously ripped from a rough jotter pad, but the handwriting was elegant. The letter read:

My dear Calloway,

I’m in luck. After some years of fruitless requests I have been granted permission to excavate a site at Lower Bedhoe in Sussex.

The previous landowner, a stubborn old devil called Sir Peter Grensham, would not allow any research into the site but his heir and only living relative is an Australian with flourishing business interests in his own country. He does not want to come to England and intends to sell off his UK interests in due course. In the meantime, he granted leave to dig and my team started work there several weeks ago.

There is a small stone circle at the site together with a barrow and I judge both to be contemporary with Stonehenge. Now here is a curious thing, Calloway. We have made our way into the mound and have found the entrance to a sepulchre which I swear is Roman. There is considerable work to be done, for the tomb’s entrance is blocked by an enormous stone. I hope to break through in the near future.

Apart from the anomaly of there being an apparently Roman tomb in a British barrow, there are some weird carvings at the tomb’s entrance. Knowing of your interest in oddities, I enclose photographs.

I have not seen their like before and I am hoping that you might be able to shed some light. Why not come over and see them first-hand? I will be grateful for any help you can give.

Yours sincerely,

Alaric Wayt

“Wayt was once a member of staff at Southdown,” explained Calloway. “Some years ago, though, he inherited a small fortune and is now able to pursue his profession free of any academic institute. Like many academics, Wayt is probably less open-minded than he would pretend—note the way he refers to my occult knowledge as an ‘interest in oddities.’ They all choose similar euphemisms. Wayt will want me to explain the carvings to him. At this time, I have no intention of doing so.”

“Why?”

“Because if I do so, when he publishes his findings about this dig, he will very properly attribute the explanation to me. The ensuing deluge of scorn would pour upon my head and not his. Academics are every bit as bitchy as actors.

“That apart, Roderick, how would you like to take a drive into Sussex to look at an ancient tomb?”

***

We arrived at the site of Wayt’s dig during the early afternoon. The journey along the coast road from Southdown had been a pleasant one and it was only when we at last reached Lower Bedhoe, which was about half-a-mile inland, that we encountered any difficulty. The local people were reluctant to direct us to the dig.

Lower Bedhoe was a very small village, little more than a main street with several short side roads off and some scattered cottages in the countryside about. In common with many English villages of its kind, it had a green and a duckpond, around which stood an early Norman church, a pub and—most unusual these days—a working smithy. There was a village store-cum-post office and an old two-roomed school from which could be heard the chatter of small children.

We asked for directions first at the store. The proprietor, a small man with shrivelled, prune-like cheeks, said, “A bad business that dig, gentlemen. I wouldn’t be doing you any favours by telling you how to get there. Good day to you.” He turned to serve a customer, obviously dismissing us.

Enquiries of other inhabitants met with varying negative attitudes. At best there was an indifferent shrugging of shoulders coupled with a refusal to answer, at worst there were several instances of open hostility. The blacksmith and the publican were both exceptionally aggressive. Perhaps if I had been readily identifiable as a priest our reception might have been more polite, but I was casually dressed.

At length we drove out of the village and within a mile or so stopped to hail a labourer working in a field. He ambled over with grudging step to see what was wanted. When I asked him where we could find the site his eyes squinted with suspicion.

“You two diggers?” he demanded.

“What?”

“You gonna help them out there with the diggin’ up of things best left to rest?”

Calloway leaned across to offer the man a cigarette. “We’re with the Department of the Environment,” he said. “We want to check the legality of what they are doing there.”

The man’s demeanour changed. He accepted the cigarette with dirty, stubby fingers, lit it and puffed with enjoyment. “Good for you, mister! You go and slap some kind of order on them if you can. Dunno if what they’re doin’ is legal or not but it ain’t right, that’s for sure.

“Drive on the way you’re goin’, maybe half to three-quarters of a mile, you’ll come to a double bend. Round that on the left you’ll see a youth hostel set back a few yards. Couple hundred yards more, there’s an old track leading off the road. Turn there an’ you’ll see two hills, a small one in front of a big one. Dad and his Lad, we call them round here. Them diggin’ fellers have got a camp in between the two. You get rid of them, mister. Us folks here’ll thank you right enough.” He touched the peak of his tattered cap and went back to his work.

“Interesting,” commented Calloway as I engaged first gear to drive on. “I’ve heard of digs fermenting bad feeling among primitive peoples but never in a place like this.”

The instructions proved accurate and very soon we were approaching a rise which could only be the Lad. It was not so much a hill, more of an intrusive lump on the landscape, perhaps about as high as a two-storey house. Behind that was a far larger hill, one hundred and fifty feet or so, crested by thick woodland. The little valley separating the hills was filled with a colourful miscellany of tents, ranging from the smallest of modern lightweights to a well-worn canvas affair so big as to be almost a marquee. I stopped the Land Rover, applying the handbrake firmly.

“There’s Wayt,” said Calloway, pointing to where two men stood at a trestle table set up in front of the marquee.

The elder of the two, a broad man of medium height with a mane of white hair, gave a cheery wave and came to greet us. “Calloway! Pleased that you could make it.”

“Hello, Wayt,” said Calloway. “This is my friend, Father Shea. He’s here because his vehicle is more suited to this terrain than is my old Rolls.”

“Good to know you, Shea,” said Wayt, his handshake firm. He gestured towards the crew-cut younger man, who called out “Hi there!” with a strong American accent. “That’s my right-hand, Ken Porter. Ken’s a research student from Wisconsin University. You wouldn’t believe that he’s my fellow countryman, would you?”

“You surprise me,” I said. Wayt’s own deep tones were very British.

“I was born in the States, Father Shea,” the archaeologist explained. “My parents died when I was very young. I was brought to England by a distant cousin of my father’s and was raised here.”

“Your letter suggests that you’re feeling very pleased with yourself,” said Calloway.

“Most assuredly,” acknowledged Wayt. “I’d almost despaired of ever getting a crack at this place. I’m delighted that the new Sir John was more amenable than the old fellow. The locals seem a tad miffed, though.”

“We noticed,” was Calloway’s dry comment. “Where is the site?”

“Behind the larger hill. There’s a small plateau just before you reach the coastal cliffs. I’ve got about a dozen enthusiastic youngsters up there right now, all beavering away. Ken and I just came down to update our chart. Have a look.”

Wayt took us to the trestle table which was covered with a large site diagram picked out on graph paper. “This is the barrow,” said Wayt, pointing. “The tomb’s entrance is here, facing inland. You’ll see that there are a dozen stones making up the circle and here, nearest to the cliff, is a flat stone which was probably a sacrificial altar.”

“I thought that all of the stone circles in Britain had been recorded,” said Calloway. “But I’ve never heard of this one.”

“No,” said Wayt. “Not many outsiders have. Successive landowners have been very tight-lipped about it. It was only after the war that it was discovered. Pure chance, really. An RAF spotter plane was testing some new kind of camera by taking a series of coastal photos. They got some very good shots of the site. There was nothing classified about the pictures and so the pilot passed them to his elder brother who published a specialist magazine. The archaeological world went wild. I was still a student at the time and my imagination was certainly fired.

“Every university in the country made a bid to get a team in here, but despite all the pressure brought to bear on him, the late Sir Peter remained adamant. Nobody was allowed onto his land. He kept armed gamekeepers here for a few years and I think that quite a number of eminent men found themselves picking shot out of their backsides.

“Of course, all that was a long time ago, and eventually most of the archaeology departments gave it up as a lost cause and forgot about it. I never did. I kept tabs on the place through the years, even taking the trouble to research into Sir Peter’s family so that I knew who his heir was. As soon as the old boy snuffed it, I had a cablegram on the way to Australia. Anyway, come along both of you and see for yourselves.”

As we neared “Dad,” I noticed that the lower slopes were thickly covered not only with the short, scrubby olive-coloured grass common to the southern chalklands but also with a profusion of gorse, brambles and wild flowers. I expected our ascent to be heavy going.

And then Wayt pointed out a well-beaten pathway of hard-packed, dusty earth. With young Porter leading the way and Wayt bringing up the rear, we began to climb. The path was as firm underfoot as any concrete pavement.

“Now this is peculiar,” mused Calloway. “Here’s a place supposedly banned to outsiders for God knows how long, and apparently avoided by the locals, yet this pathway is so well established that it’s completely devoid of plant growth.”

“Very peculiar,” agreed Wayt. “I think that this path is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. On the other hand, it hadn’t been used for many years before our arrival. When we came here, the path was invisible, well camouflaged by interwoven grasses and brambles. All the way to the treeline you can see where we had to cut the growth back. We found the path quite by accident. We were nosing around, trying to find the easiest way up, and one of the students stumbled across it.

“From the shape of the brambles along the edge of the path, I’m disposed to think that they were not the result of random growth but that they were purposely trained to cover the path. Probably the work of the misanthropic Sir Peter.”

Although the rise was not excessively steep, our conversation died away as we trudged higher. At last we reached the upper limit of the grass cover where the path disappeared into the lower edge of the forest. We halted for a breather.

“You’ll have to take it easy going through here,” warned Ken Porter, “the tree growth is very thick.”

He was right. It was apparent as we entered into their shade that the woods had completely escaped the predations of man. From bright daylight we found ourselves suddenly enclosed in green-shadowed dimness, and we constantly ducked and weaved to avoid the weighty solidity of ancient limbs. The path itself was now much softer to walk upon, being carpeted with the mulch of countless years of dead leaves. And then almost as quickly as we had entered the forest we reached the crest of the hill and were dazzled as we moved out into the bright sunlight.

The downward slope on this side was much more gentle and only about one-third of the height we had just climbed. To east and west, long arms of land inclined gradually down to a cliff edge, forming from the plateau between them a natural, horseshoe-shaped amphitheatre. Beyond the ragged brink where the land finished, the dark brown-green swell of the English Channel crawled towards the horizon. In the distance, to the west, I could see a misty patch which I guessed was Beachy Head jutting out into the sea.

The stone “circle” was more of an oval, the barrow a prominent wen in the centre. All around were signs of excavation and a number of young men and women worked at a variety of tasks, digging, scraping, sieving, cleaning. Even from where we stood we could hear the pleasant hum of good-humoured conversation punctuated by occasional shouts of laughter.

“They’re happy in their work,” I observed.

“I’m an easy taskmaster,” said Wayt. “They’re all volunteers and if they’re contented I get far more out of them. Come on, let’s go down.”

As we reached the bottom of the incline, one of the students called out to Wayt and our host excused himself. Calloway ambled away towards the far end of the circle and I tagged along.

“Don’t go too near the edge,” yelled Wayt. “It could be unsafe and it’s several hundred feet to the beach.”

Calloway waved a placatory hand and continued on to the flat slab at the point of the oval. Its surface was not truly flat but gently convex, worn and pitted and mossy and with deep channels gouged into the sides and the head.

“I think Wayt’s right about this. Sacrificial stone.” He cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “The grooves are evidently to drain away blood.”

“Human, I suppose.”

Calloway shrugged. “Depends on how big a favour the priests would want from the gods,” he opined. He waved again to Wayt. “Our friend’s anxious for us to take a look at his tomb.”

As we sauntered back, I looked with interest at the standing stones. They were not large, say about the size of those at Avebury in Wiltshire although fewer in number, but that notwithstanding each must have been an immense weight. One could only marvel at the ancient men who had laboured to bring such columns over immense distances and nigh-impossible terrain.

“Didn’t mean to sound like a nursemaid,” Wayt apologised as we joined him. “Erosion is a serious problem along this part of the coast. Some of the cliffs nearer to Hastings are losing several feet each year with rockfalls. That’s another reason I was always so keen to get to this place. I wanted to uncover its secrets before it goes crashing into the sea.”

He took a large flashlight offered by one of the students and we trailed after him as he went down into the dug-out barrow. The entrance was low and we crouched down as we went through. I felt for Calloway who was not built for such exercise. It was no better inside, for we had to squat and shuffle along. After five or six yards of a thigh-stretchingly painful journey we were stopped by the great rock which blocked the way into the tomb. It was still intact despite the signs of hard work to clear the dirt packed in around it.

“You can see that we haven’t managed to breach this yet,” said Wayt. “But we’ll get there sooner or later.” He swivelled the torch’s beam to one side. “And this is one of the sculptures you know of, Calloway.”

The photographs could not possibly have conveyed the skill of the mason who had carved the figure. In the torchlight, limned by black shadows, that stone image seemed imbued with strange life and I half expected it to struggle and scream upon its cross.

“It’s... disturbing,” I said. Wayt smiled, pleased with my reaction.

Calloway reached out and placed a gentle hand on the carving. “Extraordinary,” he murmured.

Wayt directed the torch at the opposite jamb, onto the identical figure carved there. “Right, Calloway, you’re the expert on strange things—have you any idea what these carvings signify?”

“Never seen anything like them before,” lied Calloway.

“I see.” Wayt sounded disappointed. “There’s something else,” he said, flicking the beam onto the lintel. “Since I sent you those photographs we’ve been able to clean away the dirt from up there. It now looks fairly certain that the tomb itself is Roman.”

Chiselled deeply into the lintel were the words:

HIC JACET PRISCVS

“I know a lot about Roman Britain,” said Wayt. “But the name of Priscus isn’t familiar to me. And yet he must have been of some importance to merit a tomb like this.”

“Perhaps a common soldier,” I suggested. “His importance being symbolic, even if his name is unknown to historians. You know, the eternal warrior, the universal soldier.”

Wayt shook his head. “No, Father Shea, the Romans would not have honoured their common soldiery by giving them distinctive tombs, not even concealed tombs such as this. Nor would they have bothered to record a common soldier’s name on his tomb.”

“A pity,” I said. “Great occasions in history belong to ordinary people as well as the eminencies. I think we should know more of history’s bit players. For instance, I would like to know the name of the centurion at Calvary.”

“It was Ducus Waynus,” muttered Calloway, who had a taste for bad epic films. To Wayt he said in a bored voice, “This could be some sort of battle standard, I suppose, perhaps belonging to a mercenary legion. Now I am getting out of here before my legs lock and you have to summon a bulldozer to extricate me.”

We wriggled our way out of the barrow and spent long minutes gingerly easing aching leg muscles. I wondered how a miner felt at the end of an eight-hour shift. Calloway took out his cigarette case and lit up. “Sorry that I can’t help you, Wayt. Thanks for the chance to see the tomb, though; it’s been interesting. We’ll have to leave now, we’ve a long drive ahead of us.”

The archaeologist smiled ruefully. “Ah well, the most enjoyable mysteries are those which take a lot of solving. You’ll excuse me if I don’t see you off personally. I’ll stick around and see how my team’s been doing today. Ken will take you to your car.” He shook hands and turned away.

When we gained the ridge I looked back. Wayt was already hard at work, and apparently giving a lecture to a rapt audience as he laboured. I guessed that he would make a good teacher.

While I was unlocking the Land Rover’s door, Calloway said to Porter, “You think a lot of Wayt?”

“We all do.”

Calloway took a card from his pocket and handed it to the young American. “I’m not happy about this dig,” he said. “That’s where you can reach me. I want you to contact me if anything on this site, anything at all, gives you cause to worry. If I’m not around, leave a message. But don’t mention this to Wayt. I don’t want to give him any cause for concern.”