Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

by

PAUL McAULEY

THE FIRST AND probably last Bristol Free Festival hadn’t drawn anything like the numbers its blithely optimistic organisers had predicted, but even so, the crowd was four or five times as big as any Martin Feather had ever faced. Martin had been brought in as a last-minute replacement after the regular keyboard player in Sea Change, the semi-professional group headlining the bill, had broken his arm in a five-a-side football match. Last night’s run-through had gone okay, but now, in the mouth of the beast, Martin was beginning to get the jitters. The rest of the band were happy to hang out backstage, passing around a fat spliff, drinking free beer, and bullshitting with a mini-skirted reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, but Martin was too wound-up to stay still, and after his third visit to the smelly Port-A-Loo he wandered around to the front of the stage to check out the action.

It was the hottest day yet in the hottest summer in living memory. More than three hundred people sprawled on drought-browned grass in front of the stage, and a couple of hundred more queued at icecream vans and deathburger carts or poked around stalls that sold vegetarian food, incense sticks and lumpy bits of hand-thrown pottery, hand-printed silk scarves and antique shawls and dresses. A fire-eater and a juggler entertained the festival-goers; a mime did his level best to piss them off. There was a fortune teller in a candy-striped tent. There were hippies and bikers, straight families and sullen groups of teenagers, small kids running around in face paint and dressing-up-box cowboy outfits and fairy princess dresses, naked toddlers, and a barechested sunburnt guy with long blond hair and white jeans who stood front and centre of the stage, arms held out crucifixion-style and face turned up to the blank blue sky, as he grokked the music. He’d been there all afternoon, assuming the same pose for the Trad Jazz group, the pair of lank-haired unisex folk singers, the steel band, a group of teenagers who’d come all the way from Yeovil to play Gene Vincent’s greatest hits, and the reggae that the DJ played between sets. And now for Clouds of Memory, second-from-top on the bill, and currently bludgeoning their way through ‘Paint It Black’.

Martin had joined Clouds of Memory a few months ago, but he’d quickly fallen out with the singer and lead guitarist, Simon Cowley, an untalented egomaniac who couldn’t stay in key if his life depended on it. Martin still rankled over the way he’d been peremptorily fired after a gig in Yate and left to find his own way home (it hadn’t helped that his girlfriend had dumped him in the same week), but watching his nemesis make a buffoon of himself didn’t seem like a bad way to keep his mind off his stomach’s flip-flops.

Simon Cowley ended ‘Paint It Black’ by wrenching an unsteady F chord from his guitar a whole beat behind the rest of the band, and stood centre-stage with one arm raised in triumph, as if the scattering of polite applause was a standing ovation. His shoulder-length blond hair was tangled across his face. He was wearing a red jumpsuit and white cowboy boots. He turned to the drummer and brought down his arm, kicking off the doomy opening chords of his self-penned set-closing epic, ‘My Baby’s Gone to UFO Heaven’, and Martin saw Dr. John stepping through the people scattered at the fringe of the audience, heading straight towards him.

He should have known at once that it meant trouble. Dr. John was a small-time hustler who, after dropping out of Bristol University’s Medical School, supplemented his dole by buying grass and hash at street-price in St. Paul’s, Bristol’s pocket ghetto, and selling it for a premium to students. They’d first met because Dr. John rented a rotten little flat above the club where Martin had been working. Dr. John had introduced Martin to the dubious delights of the Coronation Tap, and after Martin had set up his hole-in-the-wall secondhand record shop, Dr. John would stop by once or twice a week to sell LPs he’d found in junkshops or jumble sales, or had taken from students in exchange for twists of seeds and stems. He’d tell Martin to put on some reggae and turn it up, and do what he called the monkey dance. He’d flip through the stock boxes, pulling out albums and saying with mock-amazement, “Can you believe this shit? Can you believe anyone would actually pay money for it?” He’d look over the shoulders of browsing customers and tell them, “I wouldn’t buy that, man. It’ll make your ears bleed. It’ll lower your IQ,” or he’d read out the lyrics of prog rock songs in a plummy voice borrowed from Peter Sellers until Martin lost patience and told him to piss off. Then he’d shuffle towards the door, apologising loudly for upsetting the nice middle-class students, pausing before he stepped out, asking Martin if he’d see him at the Coronation Tap later on.

When he wasn’t hustling dope or secondhand records, Dr. John spent most of his time in the Tap, sinking liver-crippling amounts of psychedelically strong scrumpy cider, bullshitting, and generally taking the piss. Like many people who aren’t comfortable in their own skins, he was restless, took great delight in being obnoxious, and preferred other people’s voices to his own. He would recite entire Monty Python sketches at the drop of a hat, or try to hold conversations in Captain Beefheart lyrics (“The past sure is tense, Martin! A big-eyed bean from Venus told me that. Know what I mean?”). His favourite film was Get Carter, and he could play Jack Carter for a whole evening. “A pint of scrumpy,” he’d say to the landlord, “in a thin glass.” Or he’d walk up to the biggest biker in the pub and tell him, “You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me, it’s a full-time job. So behave yourself.” Amazingly, he was never beaten up, although a burly student in a rugby shirt once threw a full pint of beer in his face after being told that his eyes were like piss-holes in snow.

Dr. John’s scrumpy-fuelled exploits were legendary. The time he’d been arrested for walking down the middle of Whiteladies Road with a traffic cone on his head. The time he’d tried to demonstrate how stuntmen could fall flat on their faces, and had broken one of his front teeth on the pavement. The time he’d climbed into a tree and gone to sleep, waking up a couple of hours later and falling ten feet onto the roof of a car, leaving a dent the exact shape of his body and walking away without a bruise. The time he’d slipped on ice, fallen over, and smashed the bottle of whiskey in his pocket: a shard of glass had penetrated his thigh and damaged a nerve, leaving him with a slight but permanent limp. His life was like a cartoon. He was Tom in Tom and Jerry, Wile E. Coyote in Roadrunner. He was one of those people who bang their way from one pratfall to the next in the kind of downhill spiral that seems funny as long as you don’t get too close.

Now he gimped up to Martin, a short, squat guy with a cloud of curly black hair and a wispy beard, wearing a filthy denim jacket, a Black Sabbath T-shirt, and patchwork flares, saying loudly, “Didn’t you used to be in this band?”

“For about five minutes in April.”

Dr. John sneered at the stage. “You’re well out of it, man. Is that a gong I see, right there behind the drummer? It is, isn’t it? Fucking poseurs.”

“If they dumped Simon and found someone who could actually sing and play lead guitar, they might have the kernel of a good sound. Put the bass and drums front and centre, like a reggae set-up.”

“Not that you’re bitter or anything,” Dr. John said. He pulled a clear glass bottle half-filled with a cloudy brown liquid from one pocket of his denim jacket, unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, belched, and offered it to Martin.

Martin took a cautious sip and immediately spat it out. “Jesus. What is it?”

“Woke up on the floor of this strange flat this morning, man. I must have been invited to a party. I mixed myself a cocktail with what was left.” Dr. John snatched back the bottle, took another pull, and smacked his lips. “You have to admit it has a certain vigour.”

“It tastes like cough medicine. There’s beer backstage, if you want some.”

“Backstage? Were you playing, man? I’m sorry to have missed it.”

“I’m on next. Playing with the headliners.”

“Free beer, man, now I know you’re a star.”

“I’m only a stand-in, but I get all the perks.”

On stage, Simon Cowley, his face screwed up inside a fall of blond hair, was hunched over his guitar and picking his way through an extended solo. When Martin had joined Clouds of Memory, he’d tried to get them interested in the raw new stuff coming out of New York and London—Television and the Ramones, Dr. Feelgood and the 101ers—but Simon had sneered and said it was nothing but three-chord pub rock with no trace of musical artistry whatsoever. ‘Artistry’ was one of Simon’s favourite words. He was the kind of guy who spent Saturday afternoons in guitar shops, pissing off the assistants by playing note-by-note copies of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton solos. He liked to drop quotes from Nietzsche and Hesse into casual conversation. He was a big fan of Eric Von Daniken. He subscribed to the muso’s music paper, Melody Maker, and despised the achingly hip streetwise attitudes of the New Musical Express, which Martin read from cover to cover every week. The tension between them had simmered for a couple of weeks, until, while they were packing up after that gig in Yate, Simon had picked an argument with Martin and sacked him on the spot.

Dr. John took another swig of his cocktail and said, “Sabbath, man, they’re the only ones who can do this kind of thing properly. Did I tell you about the gig at Colston Hall this spring?”

“Only about a hundred times.”

“It wasn’t loud enough, but that was the only thing wrong with it. A thousand kids belting out ‘Paranoid’ at the top of their lungs, it was a religious experience. But this, this is like...” He looked up at the sky for inspiration, failed to find it, and took another drink.

“It’s prog rock crap,” Martin said, “but Dancing Jesus likes it.”

The barechested guy stood in the middle of the thin crowd, arms flung wide, face tilted to the blue sky, quivering all over.

Dr. John’s lifted his upper lip in a sneering smile that showed off his broken tooth. “Where his head’s at, man, he’d groove on anything. I sold him my last three tabs of acid and he dropped them all. Anyone’s in UFO heaven, it’s him.”

“Made much money here?”

“I’m here for the vibe, man.”

“Right.”

“Truly. I’m down to seeds and stems until Tuesday or Wednesday, when this a guy I know is going to deliver some primo hash. Moroccan gold, man, the real no-camel-shit-whatsoever deal. This guy, his brother’s a sailor, gets the stuff straight from the souk. I’ll put you down for an eighth, seeing as you’re a good pal and a professional musician and everything.” Dr. John looked around and sidled closer and said, “Plus, you can help me out a little right now.”

Martin was instantly wary. He said, “I’m on after this lot finishes.”

“I’ve seen these fuckers play before, man. They’re getting into the drum solo, and then there’s the bass solo, that plonker’s endless guitar wankery... You’ve got plenty of time. And it’s a really simple favour.”

“I bet.”

“A lot easier than saving someone from a beating.”

A few weeks ago, at a dub concert in a community hall in St. Paul’s, a gang of Jamaican youths had decided to get territorial on Martin’s bloodclat white ass. Dr. John and his dealer had chased them off, a heroic deed Dr. John had mentioned no more than fifty or sixty times since. Martin said, “I believe it was your friend Hector who actually saved me.”

“But I alerted him to the situation, I asked him to help you out because you’re a good friend of mine. And friends have to look after each other, right?”

Martin sighed. “If I do this thing for you, will you promise to never mention St. Paul’s again?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, man. See that girl?” Dr. John put his arm around Martin, enveloping him in a powerful odour compounded of stale booze, sweat, and pot smoke, and turned him around.

“What am I looking at?”

“The girl, man. Black hair, white dress.”

She stood beside the St John’s ambulance, in the narrow wedge of shadow it cast. Tall and willowy in a long white dress that clung to her curves, her arms bare and pale, her elfin face framed by a Louise Brooks bob of midnight-black hair.

“I’ve been watching her,” Dr. John said.

“I don’t think she’s your type.”

Regulars at the Tap sometimes speculated about Dr. John’s sex life. Everyone agreed that he must have one, but no one could imagine what it could be like.

“She’s dealing, man. Actually, she’s not really dealing because there’s no money changing hands, she’s been handing out freebies all afternoon. What you can do for me is sashay over there and cop a sample of whatever it is she’s holding. See, it really is an easy-peasey little favour.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”

“Man, that would hardly be cool. I’d blow my reputation if I was seen taking a hand-out from some hippy chick.”

“But I wouldn’t.”

“That’s different, man. You’re not in the business. You’re a civilian. Go get a sample, okay? And talk to her, try to find out where she’s getting her stuff from. A chick like that, she has to be fronting for someone. Maybe those guys who muscled into my business at the Student Union.”

“The ones who put the Fear in you,” Martin said.

One day at the beginning of the long, hot summer, Dr. John had walked into the Tap with two black eyes and a split lip, and insisted on showing everyone the stitches in his scalp whether they wanted to look or not. “Four fuckers beat me up round the back of the Student Union. Told me that it was their territory from now on. Some pockmarked guy with a goatee is working my spot now, turning the kids on to brown heroin by telling them that he’s out of grass right now but if they’d like to try a sample of this little powder...” Dr. John had looked solemn for a moment, then had put on his Get Carter voice. “Still, look on the bright side. They’re only fucking students. Maybe a bit of heroin will light up their immensely dull lives.”

Now he told Martin, “I’m scared of nothing, man. Still, if she is working for them, and they see me talking to her... You see what I mean? But you’re a civilian. They won’t touch you.”

“She looks like she’s from some cult,” Martin said. “Like the Hare Krishnas who were here earlier, handing out copies of George’s favourite book.”

“Don’t knock the guys in orange, man, they serve a mean lentil curry to people who, because of the government’s attitude to alternative lifestyles, often find themselves having to choose between eating and paying the rent. Just walk over there, cop a little of what’s she’s holding, and come right back. It’ll take you all of thirty seconds, and I swear I won’t mention saving your life ever again.”

“I’ll do it,” Martin said, “as long as you stop making those puppy eyes at me.”

He tried to affect a cool stroll as he moved through the crowd towards the girl. The closer he got, the less attractive she appeared. Her face was plastered in white powder, her Louise Brooks bob was a cheap nylon wig, and her skin was puffy and wrinkled, as if she’d spent a couple of days in a bath. Martin told her that he’d heard she had some good stuff, and she looked at him for a moment, a gaze so penetrating he felt she had seen through to the floor of his soul, before she shook her head and looked past him at something a million miles away.

Martin said, “You don’t have anything for me? How about for my friends? They’re playing next, and they could do with a little lift.”

She was staring straight through him. As if, after she’d dismissed him, he’d ceased to exist. Her eyes were bloodshot and slightly bulging, rimmed with thick mascara that made them seem even bigger. Her white dress was badly waterstained, and a clammy odour rose from it.

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Martin said, remembering how he’d felt when he’d suffered one of his numerous rejections at the school disco. It didn’t help that a gang of teenage boys jeered and toasted him with bottles of cider as he walked away.

Dr. John was waiting for him backstage, a plastic pint glass in his hand.

“I see you found the free beer,” Martin said.

“You really are a superstar, man. I mention your name and it’s like magic, this beer suddenly appears. What did she slip you? What did she say?”

“She didn’t say a word, and she didn’t slip me anything either. It’s probably some kind of scam involving herbal crap made from boiled nettle leaves or grass-type grass, and she realised that I’d see right through it.”

“All the best gear is herbal,” Dr. John said, and launched into a spiel about William Burroughs and a South American Indian drug that was blown into your nostrils through a yard-long pipe and took you on a magical mystery tour, stopping only to give Simon Cowley a shit-eating grin as he came off stage, saying, “Fab set, man. Reminded me of Herman’s Hermits at their peak.”

Simon looked at Martin and said, “Still hanging out with losers I see,” and walked past, chin in the air.

Then Martin was busy setting up his keyboards while the two festival roadies took down Clouds of Memory’s drums and mikes and assembled Sea Change’s kit, and before he knew it the set had kicked off. The sun was setting and a hot wind was getting up, fluttering the stage’s canvas roof, blowing the music towards the traffic that scuttled along the far edge of Clifton Downs. Martin concentrated fiercely on playing all the right notes in the right order in the right place, but whenever he had a few moment’s rest he glanced towards the girl. Seeing her beyond the glare of the footlights, seeing her with a hairy hippy with a beer-drinker’s belly, a couple of giggling girls who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, a bearded boy in bellbottoms and a brown chalkstripe waistcoat, a woman in a summer dress and a chiffon scarf...

When he came off, sweating hard after two encores, the rhythm guitarist of Clouds of Memory got in his face, saying something about his loser friend spiking beer. Martin brushed him off and went to look for Dr. John. There was no sign of him, backstage or front. The crowd was beginning to drift away. Two men in black uniforms had opened the back doors of the ambulance and were packing away their first aid kit. The girl was gone.

* * *

Martin didn’t think any more about it until early the next morning, when he was woken by the doorbell. It was Monday morning, ten to eight, already stiflingly hot, and Martin had a hangover from the post-gig pub session with the guys from Sea Change and their wives and girlfriends and hangers-on. When the bell rang he put a pillow over his head, but the bell just wouldn’t quit, a steady drilling that resonated at the core of his headache. Clearly, some moron had SuperGlued his finger to the bell push, and at last Martin got up and padded into the living room and looked out of the window to see who it was.

Martin’s flat was on the top floor of a house in the middle of Worcester Terrace, a row of Georgian houses that the professional middle classes were beginning to reclaim from decades of low rent squalor. Four storeys below, Dr. John stood like a smudge of soot on the clean white doorstep, looking up and waving cheerfully when Martin asked him if he’d lost his mind.

“I’ve had a bit of an adventure,” he shouted.

Martin put his keys in a sock and threw them down. By the time his visitor had laboured up the stairs he was dressed and in the kitchen, making tea. Dr. John stood in the doorway, making a noise like a deflating set of bagpipes. He had turned a colour normally associated with aubergines or baboons’ bottoms. When he had his breath back, he said, “You should find somewhere nearer the ground. I think I have altitude sickness.”

“I should punch you in the snout.”

“Whatever it is you think I did, I didn’t do it.” Dr. John flopped heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs. He had the bright eyes and clenched jaw of a speed buzz. There was fresh mud on the knees of his jeans. Grass stains on his denim jacket; a leafy twig in his bird’s nest hair.

“Then you didn’t spike Simon Cowley’s beer.”

“Oh, that.” Dr. John opened a Virginia tobacco tin and took out a roll-up. “Yeah, I did that. You have bacon and eggs to go with this tea?”

“If I had any bacon Id give you bacon and eggs if I had any eggs.”

Dr. John lit the roll-up and looked around the little kitchen. “I see you have cornflakes.”

“Knock yourself out. What did you spike him with?”

“The herbal shit I scored off that girl.” Dr. John poured milk over the bowlful of cornflakes. “Is that hot chocolate I see by the kettle?”

“So you blew your reputation as a professional drug-dealer to check out this hippy chick.”

Dr. John shook chocolate powder over his cornflakes. “My curiosity was piqued.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“She handed it over without a word. Check it out.” Dr. John fished something from the pocket of his denim jacket and showed it to Martin. It was the size of his thumbnail and crudely pressed from a greenish paste; it looked more like a bird-dropping than a pill. “Weird-looking shit, huh? So weird, in fact, that even I wouldn’t take it without testing it first. So I broke off the smallest little sliver and dropped it in Mr. UFO’s beer.”

“Too much acid has fried your brains.”

“But in the best possible way.” Dr. John was bent over the bowl, spooning up chocolate powder/milk/cornflakes mix. The roll-up was still glued to the corner of his mouth. Although the window was open, his funky odour filled the kitchen. “So, did my freebie take your wanky friend to somewhere good?”

“Good enough for his pal to know he’d been spiked.”

“It didn’t give him fits, make him foam at the mouth, make him sing in tune?”

“I didn’t hang around to find out. He just looked very spaced. Had a thousand yard stare and a stupid grin.”

“Cool. Maybe I’ll give it a test flight this afternoon. Make me some more tea, man, and I’ll tell you about the girl.”

Dr. John said that he had followed her across the Downs into the wild strip of woods along the edge of the Avon Gorge. “She was like an elf, man. Breezed through those fucking woods as if she was born to it.”

“So she isn’t the front for Turkish gangsters. She really is just some crazy hippy.”

“She might have been crazy, but she really could move. Floated right down those steep narrow paths to the bottom of the gorge in about a minute flat. I got stuck halfway, saw her cross the road at the bottom, saw her climbing over the rail on the other side, down to the river.” Dr. John lit a fresh roll-up and looked at Martin, suddenly serious. “You know how the Avon is almost dried up because of the drought? There’s grass growing on the mud, and where grass isn’t growing it’s all dry and cracked. She walked over that shit, man, straight towards what’s left of the river. Then a couple of lorries went past, and when they were gone she wasn’t there any more.”

“She jumped into the river? Come on.”

“One moment she was walking across those mud flats, and then those bastard lorries came along, and she was gone, that’s all I know.”

“Let me get this straight. She was giving away some kind of drug for free, and then she was struck by a fit of remorse, so she walked down to the river and drowned herself.”

Martin, used to Dr. John’s fantastic stories, reckoned that about half of what he’d been told was true. He believed that his friend had tried to follow the girl and lost her in the woods; the rest was just the usual bullshit embellishment.

“I don’t know what her motivation was, man. I only know what I saw.”

“You didn’t go look for her? Or call the police?”

“I was on this dead-end path halfway up the side of the fucking gorge. I couldn’t go any further, all I could do was climb up and start over, and if she reappeared while I was finding a new way down I would have missed her. So I sat there and kept watch, but the light was going, and I didn’t see her again, and after a bit I suppose I fell asleep. Woke up this morning covered in dew, with this bastard headache.”

“Let me guess: while you were keeping a look-out for this girl, you finished off your party cocktail.”

“It was my only sustenance, man. I wasn’t about to start eating leaves.”

“Well, look on the bright side. If she did drown herself, you don’t have to worry that she’ll steal your customers.”

“You don’t believe me. That’s cool. But I viddied it, brother, with my own glazzies. She walked over the mud and then she... Shit!”

Dr. John’s chair went over as he pushed away from the table. Martin turned, saw the bird on the stone ledge outside the window. His first thought was that it was a gull, but although it was the right mix of white and grey, it was twice the size of any ordinary gull, and sort of lop-sided, and stank horribly, like rotten meat and low-tide sewage. When he reached out to shut the window, it fixed him with a mad red eye and snapped at his hand, its sharp yellow bill splintering the window frame when he snatched his fingers away. Then it stretched its wings (one seemed longer than the other, and both had growths, bat-like claws, at their joints) and dropped away in a half-turn and floated out across the communal gardens of the terrace, a white speck dwindling away towards the docks.

* * *

Dr. John kept glancing up at the sky as he walked with Martin up the hill towards the centre of Clifton. He was convinced that the bird had something to do with the girl. “It was a spy, man. A mutant gull from the lower depths of wherever she came from.”

“It had some sort of disease,” Martin said.

Dr. John turned a full circle, his face tipped skywards, and said in a sonorous film trailer baritone, “A mutant gull on a mission from Hell.”

“You see pigeons with parts of their feet missing all the time. It’s something to do with walking on pavements.”

Dr. John laughed. “You’re so straight, man, they could use you as a ruler.”

“Maybe it ate a bad kebab on a rubbish tip.”

“Maybe it ate one of the Tap’s mystery meat pies. I’m pretty sure they’ve fried my chromosomes.” Dr. John did a lurching Frankenstein walk for a few steps, arms held straight out, eyes rolled back.

They parted by the tidy park landscaped around the ruins of a church that had been hit by a German bomb during Bristol’s Blitz. Dr. John said he was going to go home and drop that pill and see where it took him.

“Don’t be crazy,” Martin said.

“It’s all part of my ongoing exploration of inner space, man. Cheaper than TV and a lot more fun.”

“It’s probably made out of hemlock and lead paint. Weedkiller and rat snot.”

“Don’t be such a worrywart. There isn’t a pill or powder I can’t handle,” Dr. John said, and sloped off across the grassy space, a squat stubborn figure listing slightly to the left.

* * *

The next day, lunchtime in the Coronation Tap, one of Dr. John’s grebo pals lurched up to Martin and asked where the little fucker was hiding himself.

“I’m not his keeper,” Martin said. He was having a quiet pint and a pastie, and thinking about whether to shut up shop for a couple of weeks and go on holiday. The only customer he’d had all morning had been a confused old lady who, after poking about in the bins for ten minutes, had asked him if he had any Ken Dodd records. Scotland, perhaps. Apparently it had rained somewhere in Scotland only yesterday.

The grebo peered at Martin through a shroud of long, lank hair. He was barefoot, barechested under his filthy afghan coat, and stank like a goat. “I got something for him. The stuff he’s been waiting for. You know.”

“Not really,” Martin said, and remembered that Dr. John had mentioned something about expecting a delivery of hash.

“We had a deal, right, so I went round to his flat and he wasn’t there, and I’ve been waiting two whole fucking hours here, and now I have to go down the social and sign on. When you see him, tell him I was looking for him,” the grebo said, and lurched off without giving his name.

That evening, after he’d closed up his shop, Martin made a detour on the way home, to call on Dr. John. He told himself that his friend was probably in the middle of one of his forty-eight hour sleepathons, but there was no harm checking. Just in case. He leaned on Dr. John’s doorbell for five minutes, listening to it trill two floors above him, then went down the whitewashed steps and rang the bell of the private members club in the basement. It was owned by Dr. John’s landlord, Mr. Mavros, an after-hours drinking spot featuring sticky purple shagpile and red leatherette booths. Martin had worked behind its bar last year, when he’d been scraping together enough seed money for his record shop.

“I hope this doesn’t mean trouble for me,” Mr. Mavros said, after he had handed over the key to Dr. John’s flat.

“He’s ill,” Martin lied. “I said I’d stop by and see if he needed anything. Soup or aspirin or whatever.”

“He look ill when I see him,” Mr. Mavros said. He was a thin, consumptive man with no hair on his head except for a splendid pair of thick black eyebrows. He wore red braces over his immaculate white shirt, and as usual a small cigar was plugged into the corner of his mouth. “He come back from somewhere when I was locking up this place, two o’clock in the morning. I say hello and he look straight past me. Into the distance, like he see something that isn’t there. I know he drink, he smoke dope, but this was different. You tell him, Martin, if he start on the hard drugs, if he cause me trouble, that’s it, I throw him out.”

The door to Dr. John’s tiny flat stood ajar. The bed-sitting room was hot and stale. Sunlight burned at the edges of the drawn curtains. The bed was piled with cushions and dirty clothes; the floor was strewn with clothes and broken-backed paperbacks, unsleeved records and record sleeves, empty cans and bottles, tin-foil takeaway cartons, and yellowing newspapers. In the filthy little kitchen, the tap was running over a stack of unwashed dishes and pots. Martin turned it off, heard something splash somewhere else in the flat. He called out, felt a jolt of nerves when there was another splash.

The bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole just big enough for bath and bog and wash-basin. The light was off, and it smelt like the seal pool in the zoo. The bath was brimful, and in the semi-darkness Martin could see a shape under the shivering surface of the water.

“John?”

A pale hand lifted like a lily; water cascaded over the edge of the tub. Martin jerked the light cord with a convulsive movement and in the sudden harsh glare of the unshielded bulb the boy in the bathtub—fully clothed, in the same brown, chalkstripe waistcoat he’d been wearing at the Free Festival—sat bolt upright, eyes wide, water running out of his nose and mouth.

Martin helped the boy out of the tub and got him onto the bed, but he wouldn’t answer any of Martin’s questions about Dr. John, and quickly fell into something deeper than sleep. He breathed with his mouth open, making a rasping gurgle, and didn’t stir when Martin went through his pockets, finding nothing but a couple of pound notes wadded together in a knot of papier-mâché. Martin suddenly found that he couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer with this unquiet sleeper in the hot, claustrophobic flat, and fled into the late-afternoon sunlight and the diesel dust and ordinary noise of traffic.

He sat on the bench beside a telephone box on the other side of the road and thought about his options. If he told Mr. Mavros what he’d found, the landlord would probably throw out the boy and change the lock on the door. And if he went to the police, they’d probably make a note of Dr. John’s disappearance and forget all about it. He could always walk away, of course, but Dr. John was a friend who had helped him out of a tight spot, and he had a vague but nagging sense of duty.

Sooner or later, he thought, Dr. John would turn up, or the boy would wake up and slope off to wherever Dr. John was hanging out. All he had to do was wait. How hard could that be? He went around the corner, bought a parcel of fish and chips and a can of Coke, and returned to the bench. The blue sky darkened and the air grew hotter and thicker. A police car slowed as it went past and the driver took a lingering look at Martin, who had to suppress an impulse to wave when the car came back in the other direction ten minutes later. The streetlights flickered on. A little later, Mr. Mavros switched on the light over the door of his club, illuminating the board painted with its faintly sinister motto: THERE ARE NO STRANGERS HERE, ONLY FRIENDS WHO HAVEN’T MET.

Martin bought another Coke at the fish-and-chip shop, and when he returned to the bench saw something swoop down onto the roofline of the row of houses, joining the half dozen white birds that hadn’t been there five minutes ago. They’re only gulls, he told himself, there are plenty of gulls in Bristol. But he got the shivers anyway, flashing on the monster that had nearly amputated his fingers, and was about to turn tail and head for home when he saw the boy in the brown waistcoat ambling away down the street.

The boy must have crawled back into the bath before he left Dr. John’s flat; he tracked wet footprints that grew smaller and smaller as Martin followed him through the villagey centre of Clifton towards the Avon Gorge, walking with a quickening pace as if drawn to some increasingly urgent siren song. By the time they’d reached the grassy space in front of Brunel’s suspension bridge, Martin was jogging to keep up. The boy walked straight across the road, looking neither right nor left, and plunged into the bushes beside the public lavatories. Martin got up his nerve and followed, found a steep, narrow path, and climbed to the top.

The sky was cloudless and black. The moon, almost full, was setting. The stubby observatory tower that housed a camera obscura shone wanly. Beyond it, the boy and half a dozen other people stood at the rail along the edge of the gorge. Martin skulked behind the thin cover of a clump of laurel bushes. He had the airy feeling that something was about to happen, but didn’t have the faintest idea what it would be. One of the giant, arch-pierced stone towers that supported the suspension bridge reared up behind his hiding place, and it seemed to him that the watchers at the rail were staring at the lamp-lit road that ran between bridge’s white-painted chains and struts to the other side of the deep narrow gorge.

Martin settled behind the laurels, sipped warm Coke. Gradually, more people drifted across the moonlit grass to join the little congregation at the rail. A girl in a cotton dress came past Martin’s hiding place, so close he could have reached out and touched her bare leg. No one spoke. They stood at the rail and stared at the bridge. They reminded Martin of the gulls on the roof. Whenever he checked his digital watch, cupping his right wrist with his left hand to hide its little light, far less time had passed than he had thought.

10:08.

10:32.

10:56.

He must have dozed, because the noise jerked him awake. The people lined up along the edge of the drop were chanting, a slow liturgical dirge of nonsense words rich in consonants. They bent against the rail, their arms outstretched, swaying like sea anemones in a current, reaching towards the bridge. Martin turned, and saw that two shadowy figures were walking along the road to the midpoint of the bridge, where the two downcurving arcs of white-painted suspension chains met. One was a man, the other the girl in the white dress. She embraced her companion for a moment, and then he broke away and clambered over the rail and without hesitation or ceremony stepped out into thin air and plummeted into darkness.

Martin stood up, his heart beating lightly and quickly, his whole skin tingling, and thought that he saw a brief green flash in the river directly below the bridge, a moment of heat lightning. The girl was walking along the bridge towards the other side of the gorge; the people at the rail were beginning to drift away, each moving in a different direction.

One of them had a cloud of bushy hair, and walked with a distinct list.

Martin chased after him, stumbling in the dark, making far too much noise as he dodged from one clump of bushes to the next, at last daring to cut across his path and grab him by the shoulders and turn him around. Dr. John tried to twist away, like a freshly caught fish flopping in a trawlerman’s grasp. Martin held on and at last his friend quietened and stood still, his gaze fixed on something a thousand miles beyond Martin’s left shoulder.

“Let’s get out of this,” Martin said, and took hold of Dr. John’s right arm above the elbow and steered him through the streets of Clifton to Worcester Terrace. There was another brief struggle after Martin had opened the front door, but then Dr. John quietened again and allowed himself to be led up the four flights of stairs to Martin’s flat. He stood in a kind of dazed slouch, blinking slowly in the bright light of the kitchen while Martin made coffee, taking no notice of the mug that Martin tried to put it in his hand.

Martin leaned against the counter by the sink and sipped his own coffee and asked Dr. John where he’d been, what had happened to him, what the fuck had just happened on the bridge.

“Someone jumped. I saw it. He climbed over the rail and let go.”

Dr. John didn’t even blink. Martin had to step hard on the impulse to slap him silly.

“It’s something to do with the pill, isn’t it? The green pill, and the girl who gave it to you. Don’t try to deny it, I saw her with whoever it was that jumped.”

Dr. John stood still and silent, face slack, shoulders slumped. Or not entirely still—one hand was slowly and slyly creeping towards the breast pocket of his denim jacket. Martin knocked it away and reached inside the pocket and pulled out the green pill and held it in front of Dr. John’s face.

“What is this shit? What does it do to you?”

Dr. John’s eyes tracked the pill as Martin moved it to and fro; his hand limply pawed the air.

“Don’t be pathetic,” Martin said. He thrust the pill into the pocket of his jeans and steered Dr. John into the living room and put him to bed on the sofa. Then he went out to the phone box at the end of the road, dialled 999 and told the operator that he’d seen someone jump from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and hung up when she asked for his name.

* * *

When Martin went into the living room the next morning, Dr. John was fast asleep, curled into the back of the sofa and drooling into the cushion he was using as a pillow. After Martin had shaken him awake and poured a cup of tea into him, he claimed not to remember anything about the last night, saying, “Man, I was definitely out of my head.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Dr. John drank a mug of tea and devoured three slices of white bread smeared with butter and sprinkled with brown sugar while Martin told him about the boy in the bathtub, the people lined up at the railing above the Avon Gorge, and the girl who had escorted the man to the midpoint of the bridge, how she’d embraced him, how he’d stepped into thin air. Dr. John wore a funny little smile, as if he knew the secret that would make sense of everything, but when Martin had finished he shrugged and said, “People jump off the bridge all the time. They queue up to jump off. The police have to comb pieces of them out of the trees, scrape them off the road, dig them out of the mud...” He patted his pockets. “Got any fags?”

Martin found a packet his girlfriend had left behind.

“Silk Cut? They’re not real cigarettes,” Dr. John said, but tore off the filter off one and lit it and sat back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

Martin was tired of trying to crack Dr. John’s bullshit insouciance, but decided to give it one more try. He leaned across the table and said as forcefully as he could, “Someone jumped off the bridge. I saw it.”

“I believe you, man,” Dr. John said, still smiling that sly little smile.

“If you don’t remember anything at all, you really were out of your head. And I thought there wasn’t a pill or powder you couldn’t handle.”

“It isn’t that I don’t remember anything, man. I just don’t remember any of the shit you saw. That was just the pattern on the veil that hides the true reality of things. That hides what’s really going on.”

“So what was really going on?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I want to understand.”

“Are you worried about me, man? I’m touched.”

“I saw someone throw himself off the suspension bridge. The girl who gave you that pill, the one in the white dress, was right there with him when he jumped. I think that guy got high on whatever it is she’s peddling, just like you did, and she persuaded him to jump. I think she killed him. That’s what I saw. How about you?”

Dr. John thought for a few moments. “What you have to understand is that the green shit doesn’t do anything but put you in the right frame of mind. It takes you to the beach, and after that it’s up to you. You have to wade out into the sea and give yourself up to it of your own free will. And if you can do that, the sea takes you right through the bottom of the world into this space that’s deeper and darker than anywhere you’ve ever been. The womb of the world, the place where rock and water and air and everything else came from.”

He developed a thousand-yard stare for a moment, then shook himself and smiled around the cigarette, showing his broken tooth.

“It’s very dark and quiet, but it isn’t lonely. It’s like the floor of the collective unconscious. Not in the Jungian sense, but something deeper than that. You can lose yourself in it forever. You dissolve. This is hard, trying to explain how it is to someone who doesn’t believe a word of it, but haven’t you ever had that feeling when everything inside you and everything outside you, everything in the whole wide world, lines up perfectly, just for a moment? I remember when I was a kid, this one day in summer. Hot as it is now, but everything lush and green. Cow parsley and nettles growing taller than me along the edges of the road on the way up to the common. Farmers turned cows and sheep out to graze there, and the grass was short and wiry, and warm beneath you when you lay down, and the sun was a warm red weight on your closed eyelids. You lay there and felt the whole world holding you to itself, and you heard a lark singing somewhere above you in the sunlight and the warm wind. You couldn’t see it, but it was singing its heart out above you, and everything dissolved into this one moment of pure happiness. You know what I’m saying? Well, if you take that feeling and make it a thousand times more intense and stretched that one moment out to infinity, it would be a little like where I went.”

“Except that you were high. It didn’t really happen, you only thought it did.”

Dr. John looked straight at Martin, smiling that sly smile, and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re just a tourist, man. A day-tripper. You might have ventured onto the beach a couple of times, you might even have dipped a toe into the sea, but that’s as far as you’ve ever dared to go. Because as far as you’re concerned, drugs are recreational. Something you do for fun.”

Martin felt a sharp flare of anger. He’d seen something awful, he believed that he had risked his life to rescue Dr. John, and his only reward was scorn and derision. “If you want to fuck yourself up,” he said, “do a proper job and score some heroin from that guy who works for those gangsters who beat you up.”

“I found something better,” Dr. John said. “We all did. Something we didn’t know we needed until we found it. You don’t need it, man. That’s why she turned you down. Even if you got hold of some of her stuff and got off on it, you wouldn’t be able to take the next step. You wouldn’t be able to surrender yourself. But we knew where it would take us before we’d even seen it. We ached for it. It’s our Platonic ideal, man, the missing part we’ve been searching for all our lives.”

“One of your little gang killed himself last night. He threw himself off the suspension bridge, right in front of my eyes. He committed suicide. Is that what you want?”

“Suicide? Is that what you think you saw?”

Dr. John looked straight at Martin again. For a moment, Martin glimpsed the worm of self-loathing that writhed behind the mask of his fatuous smile and flippant manner. He looked away, no longer angry, but embarrassed at having glimpsed something more intimate than mere nakedness.

“Something wants our worship,” Dr. John said, “and we want oblivion. It isn’t hard to understand. It’s a very simple deal.”

“If you take another of those pills, you could be the next one off that bridge,” Martin said.

Dr. John stood up. “You have your nice little flat, man, and your nice little shop and your nice little gigs with loser pub rock bands. You have a nice little life, man. You’ve found your niche, and you cling to it like a limpet. Good for you. The only problem is, you can’t understand why other people don’t want to be like you.”

Martin stood up too. “Stay here. Crash out as long as you like. Get your head straight.”

Dr. John shook his head. “My friends are waiting for me.”

“Don’t go back to the river,” Martin said, but Dr. John was already out of the door and clumping away downstairs.

* * *

Martin shut up shop early that afternoon and took a walk up to the observatory. Children ran about in the sweltering heat, watched by indulgent parents. People were sunbathing on suncrisped grass. There was a queue at the ice-cream stall by the entrance to the observatory tower. Someone was flying a kite. It was all horribly normal, but Martin was possessed by a restless sense that something bad was going to happen. As if a thunderstorm hung just beyond the horizon, waiting for the right wind to blow it his way. As if the world was suddenly all an eggshell above a nightmare void. He drifted back through Clifton village and ended up in the Coronation Tap and drank five pints of Directors and ate one of the pub’s infamous mystery pies, and at closing time walked back to the suspension bridge and thrashed through bushes to the top of the rise.

There they were, leaning at the rail in the warm half-dark, staring into the abyss.

None of them so much as glanced at Martin as, his heart beating quickly and lightly, his whole skin tingling airily, he walked across the grass. They leaned at the rail and stared with intense impassivity at the gorge and the floodlit bow of the suspension bridge. The two women on either side of Dr. John didn’t even blink when Martin tried to pull him away, tugging one arm and then the other, trying to prise his grip from the rail, finally getting him in a bear-hug and hauling as hard as he could. As they staggered backwards, a gull skimmed out of the dusky air and bombed them with a pint of hot wet birdshit. It stank like thousand-year-old fish doused in ammonia, and stung like battery acid when it ran into Martin’s eyes. Half-blind, gasping, he let go of Dr. John and tried to wipe the stuff from his eyes and face, and another gull swooped past, spattering him with a fresh load, clipping him with the edge of a wing. Martin sat down hard, saw more gulls circling in the dark air, one of them much bigger than the rest. One dipped down and swooped towards him, its wings lifted in a V-shape. His nerve gave out then, and he scrambled to his feet and ran, had almost gained the shelter of the bushes when the bird hit him from behind, ripping its claws across his scalp and knocking him down. He was crawling towards the bushes, blinded by blood and birdshit, when another gull smashed into him, and the world swung around and flew away like a stone on the end of a string.

* * *

When Martin came to, the swollen disc of the full moon was setting beyond the trees on the other side of the gorge. Its cold light filled his eyes. The person standing over him was a shadow against it, reaching down, clasping his hand and helping him sit up.

“Christ,” Simon Cowley said. “They really worked you over.”

Martin’s face and hair were caked in blood and gullshit. His skin burned and his eyes were swollen half-shut. He gingerly touched the deep lacerations in his scalp, winced, and took his hand away.

“Gulls,” he said.

“Vicious little fuckers, aren’t they? Especially the big one.”

“What do you know about it? And what are you doing here?”

“I came here after your hippy friend spiked my beer. I woke up from a horrible dream and found myself standing at the rail over there, in the middle of a whole bunch of sleepwalkers. I’ve been coming back every night since. And every night someone has gone over the bridge into the river.” Simon’s long blond hair was unwashed and he stank of sweat and sickness. His eyes were black holes in his pale face. A khaki satchel—an old gas mask carrier—hung from his shoulder. He looked around and said in a hoarse whisper, “I think there’s something in the river. I think it swam in from the sea on the last high tide, it’s been trapped here ever since because the drought lowered the level of the river. It’s been living on what they give it.”

“They worship it,” Martin said, remembering Dr. John’s ravings.

“I think it draws them here and makes them jump off the suspension bridge. I think it eats them,” Simon said, “because no one has reported finding any bodies. You’d think, after at least three people jumped off the bridge in as many days, one of them would have washed up. I went down there yesterday in daylight, and took a good look around. Nothing. It devours them. Snaps them up whole.”

Martin got to his feet. Heavy black pain rolled inside his skull. His eyes were on fire and his lacerations felt like a crown of thorns. He said, “We should call the police.”

“You saw what was down there. I know you did because I saw you here last night.”

“I saw something. I don’t know what it was.”

“You think the police can do anything about something like this?” Simon cocked his head. “You hear that?”

“I hear it.”

People were chanting, somewhere below the edge of the gorge.

“It’s beginning,” Simon said.

“What’s beginning?”

“You can help me or stay here, I don’t care,” Simon said, and ran towards the path that led down the face of the gorge.

Martin chased after him. Everything was black and white in the moonlight. Bleached trees and boulders and slabs of rock loomed out of their own shadows. The day’s heat beat up from bare rock. The black air was oven-baked. Martin sweated through his T-shirt and jeans. His feet slipped on sweat inside his Doc Martens. Sweat stung his swollen eyes, his lacerated scalp. He caught up with Simon at the beginning of a steep smooth chute of limestone that had been polished by generations of kids using it as a slide. At the foot of the gorge, people were crossing the road, shambling towards the girl in the white dress, who stood at the rail at the edge of the river. A passing car sounded its horn, swerved past them.

Simon didn’t look around when Martin reached him. He said, “You see her? She’s the locus of infection. She’s been missing for two weeks, did you know that? I did some research, looked at back copies of the Evening Post for anything about people jumping from the bridge, and there she was. I think she jumped off the bridge and the thing in the river took her and changed her and sent her out to bring it food.”

Below, people were climbing over the guard rail at the edge of the road. The river shone like a black silk ribbon between its wide banks of mud. White flakes—gulls—floated above one spot.

“We have to stop it right now,” Simon said. “It’s high tide tonight. I think it wants to take them all before it goes back to sea.”

“All right. How are we going to stop it?”

“I’m going to blow it up. I stole two sticks of dynamite from work. Taped them together with a waterproof fuse. You distract them and I throw the dynamite and we run.”

“Distract them?”

People were slogging across the mud towards the gyre of gulls. They had started up their chant again.

“Shout at them,” Simon said. “Throw rocks. Try to take back your hippy friend, like you did just now. Whatever you like, as long as you get them to chase you. Then I’ll chuck the dynamite in the river, right at the spot under those gulls.”

“Suppose they won’t chase me?”

In the high-contrast glare of the moonlight, Simon’s grin made his face look like a skull. “I’ll chuck it in anyway.”

“You’re crazy. You’ll kill them all.”

“They’re already dead,” Simon said, and turned away. Martin grabbed the canvas satchel, but Simon caught the strap as it slid past his wrist. For a moment, they were perfectly balanced, the satchel stretched between them; then a gull swooped out of the black air. Simon ducked, staggered, put his foot down on thin air and fell backwards. Martin sat down heavily, the canvas satchel in his lap, heard a rolling crackle as Simon crashed through bushes, saw the pale shape of the gull fall away as it plummeted after him.

Martin got to his feet and slung the satchel over his shoulder and went on down the path, fetched up breathless at the bottom, his headache pounding like a black strobe. An articulated lorry went past in a glare of headlights and a roar of hot wind and dust. Martin ran across the road, clambered over the guardrail, and dropped to a swale of grassy mud, breaking through a dry crust and sinking up to his knees.

He levered himself out and stumbled forwards. He could hear the tide running in the river, smell its rotten salty stink. Inky figures stood along the edge of the black water on either side of the girl’s pale shadow. Gulls swooped around them. Their hands were raised above their heads and they were chanting their nonsense syllables.

Iä! Iä! Iä-R’lyeh!

There was a sudden splashing as hundreds of fish leapt out of the water, shards of silver flipping and thrashing around the line of men and women. Martin ran down a shallow breast of mud, shouting Dr. John’s name, and something huge breached the river. Light beat up from it in complex labial folds, rotten, green, alive. Gulls swirled through the light and flared and winked out. Blazing faultlines shot across the mud in every direction; fish exploded in showers of scales and blood.

The people were perfectly silhouetted against the green glare. They were still chanting.

Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

Martin staggered towards them, feet sinking into foul mud, swollen eyes squeezed into slits, and locked his arms around Dr. John’s neck. Dr. John fought back, but Martin was stronger and more desperate, and hauled his friend backwards, step by step. The light began to pulse like a heartbeat. A virulent jag cut straight in front of Martin and Dr. John. Mud exploded with popcorn cracks. Martin fell down, pulling Dr. John with him, and the giant gull swooped past, missing Martin’s face by inches. Dr. John tried to pull away and Martin clung to him with the last of his strength, watched helplessly as the misshapen bird swept high through the throbbing green glare and turned and plummeted towards them like a dive bomber.

Someone gimped past—Simon Cowley, raising the broken branch he’d been using as a crutch. The bird screeched and slipped sideways, but Simon threw his make-shift spear and caught it square in its breast, and it exploded in a cloud of feathers and rotten meat. Something like a nest of snakes was thrashing in the centre of the light. A thick, living rope whipped across the line of men and women, knocking them down like nine-pins, sweeping them into the river. Simon threw himself flat as another ropey tentacle cracked through the air. For a moment it flexed above Martin, its tip crusted with feathery palps and snapping hooks, dripping a thin slime, and then it sinuously withdrew. The light was dying back into itself. Water rushed into the place where something huge and unendurable had opened a brief gap in the world, bubbled and steamed, and closed over.

* * *

Eighteen months later, Martin was with his friends in the middle of the crowd coming out of the Watershed at the end of a Clash concert, his ears ringing and sweat turning cold on his skin under his ripped T-shirt and Oxfam jacket and straight-legged Levis 501s, when someone caught his arm and called his name. Martin turned, saw a guy in a black dufflecoat, short blond hair and a pinched white face, and after a couple of seconds recognised Simon Cowley.

Martin told his friends that he’d catch up with them in the pub, and said to Simon, “I never thought you’d be into punk rock.”

“I’m not really here for the music.”

Martin grinned. He was still pumped up by the concert’s energy. “You missed something tremendous.”

“I heard about your friend.”

“Come to gloat, have you? Come to say ‘I told you so’?”

“Actually, I came to say I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I also heard you gave up your shop, you joined a group, you have a record deal...”

“Those people I was with? That’s the group. And the deal, it’s for a single with Rough Trade. Nothing major,” Martin said, “but we all had three-day hangovers after we signed.”

“Still, a record deal.”

“Yeah. How about you? I mean, I heard you broke up Clouds of Memory...”

“I gave all that up.” Simon hesitated, then said, almost shyly, “Want to see something?”

“You don’t look well, Simon. What have you been doing since...”

Simon shrugged. “I’ve been working. I’ve been waking up every night from bad dreams.”

“I get those too, sometimes.” But Martin didn’t want to talk about that; didn’t want to talk about anything to do with those awful days in that long hot summer. “Well, it was nice to run into you—”

“I’d really like you to see this. Apart from me, you’re the only person who’ll understand what it means. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

“Only a minute, then,” Martin said, and with a sense of foreboding followed Simon to the quay on the other side of the Watershed. Black water lapped a few feet below the edge of the walkway, flexing its patchwork covering of chip papers and beer cans and plastic detergent bottles. Martin shivered in the icy breeze that cut across the water, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and said, “What are we looking for?”

Simon put a finger to his lips, pointed at the water.

They were like tadpoles grown to the size of late-term human embryos. They were pale and faintly luminous, with heavy heads and large, black, lidless eyes and small pursed mouths. Skinny arms folded under pulsing gill slits. Snakey, finned tails. They hung in the black water at different levels.

Martin stared at them, little chills chasing each other through his blood, and whispered, “What are they?”

“Ghosts, maybe. Or shells, some kind of energy cast off when, you know...”

When the people had been taken. When they had been consumed. Snapped up. Devoured. No bodies had been found; fourteen people had simply disappeared, as people sometimes do. Most of them were like Dr. John, chancers on the edge of society, missed by no one but their landlords and dealers and parole officers. There’d been some fuss in the local news about a housewife and a schoolboy who’d both gone missing the same day, but no one had made the connection between the two, and the story soon slipped off the pages. And that might have been the end of it, except that six months later the flat below Dr. John’s was flooded; when he went to investigate, Mr. Mavros found Dr. John lying fully clothed in his overflowing bath, dead of a heroin overdose. Dr. John’s parents had disowned him long ago. Only Martin and Mr. Mavros had attended the cremation, and Martin had scattered the ashes off the suspension bridge. And that, he thought, really had been the end of it, except for the dreams. Except for these ghosts, pale in the black water.

“I think they come for the music,” Simon said. “Or maybe for what the music does to people. A concert is a kind of collective act of worship, isn’t it? Maybe they feed on it...”

There were six or seven or eight of them. They looked up at Martin and Simon through the water and the floating litter.

“There used to be more,” Simon said.

“Isn’t one of them sort of listing to the left?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

Simon said, “I tried to catch one once. I borrowed a keep net from my dad. They slipped right through it.”

Martin said, “Afterwards, I found one of those pills in my pocket.”

“Did you take it?”

“What would be the point?”

He’d flushed it down the sink. It had dissolved reluctantly, frothing slimy bubbles like a salted slug and giving off a vile stink that had reminded him of gull-shit. Dr. John had been right: it hadn’t been meant for him. Dr. John and the others had been on the road to oblivion long before they’d been snared by the monster or old god or whatever it was that had been briefly trapped in the tidal mud of the Avon. If it hadn’t taken them, something else would: an unlit gas oven; a razorblade and a warm bath; a swan dive from the suspension bridge; an overdose.

Martin had brushed against it and lived, but he’d been changed, no doubt about it. He’d given up his second-hand record shop and his nice flat with its convenient location and its view across the communal gardens towards the green breast of Jacob’s Hill, and moved into a squat with the rest of his new band. He was happy there and gave himself one hundred per cent to his music, even though he was pretty sure, despite the record deal, it wouldn’t last. But that didn’t matter. He was only twenty-six, for God’s sake. There was plenty of time to move on, to try something else.

He stood with Simon in the dark and the chill wind and watched the ghostly things in the water fade away.

“Sometimes I can almost hear them, you know?” Simon said. “I can almost understand what they’re trying to tell me.”

“It might be an idea to try to forget about them.”

Simon sighed, shivered inside his duffel coat, tried to smile. “I never thought I’d say this, but you’re probably right.”

“Want to come and have a drink with me?”

“I have to get the last bus home.” Simon had that uncharacteristic shy look again. “I’m getting married in a couple of months. My fiancée will be waiting up for me.”

“Congratulations,” Martin said, and discovered that he meant it.

“Maybe we’ll have that drink some other time,” Simon said, and they shook hands at the edge of the water and went their different ways into the city, into the rest of their lives.