Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

EGGS

by

STEVE RASNIC TEM

GO TO THE SHORES the washed-out billboard had ordered. Scott wondered why they hadn’t repainted the sign, or torn it down, as is it made a poor advertisement for a vacation spot. He could detect traces of successive layers of advertising, the latest being a dark-haired woman in a bikini, lounging on the sand, her red lips pouting at passing drivers. Her lips were the only part of her still bright, blood-like in comparison to the rest. Her skin had faded into a series of pale, rough blotches. Her black hair had receded into greyish cobwebs, her bikini merely a sketch that made her more hideous than seductive. Her eyes had been torn out.

Other things were revealed by tattered windows in this top layer of billboard: a piece of thick rope, part of an ancient vessel, a darkened tentacle of squid or octopus. There were letters and words as well, peeking through the torn spaces or leaking into the thin top layers of paper, but they appeared backwards, part of some foreign alphabet he did not recognise.

It’s like a dream of the beach, he had thought, but someone else’s dream and not your own. He wondered at the peculiar perception. The dream of someone much like himself who never went to the beach, who knew it only from movies and guidebooks or ancient, crumbling billboards erected in weedy lots too far off the interstate to be inviting. In the dream there is no sensation of sand between the toes, clinging to the back, the gritty feel of it inside wet swimming trunks, because the dreamer has not walked in sand for a very long time now, not since he was eight, and there had been that last trip to a broken-down seedy pier a few weeks before his parents’ divorce.

In the dream the beach is wide and hot, brilliantly overlit in the way dreams can be when something essential is about to occur. The heated glare makes the faces of his fellow swimmers almost impossible to see, and in any case he knows he would avert his eyes if a viewing seemed imminent.

Now and then someone wades offshore and does not return, but no one else appears to be alarmed.

The blue of the water is an unnatural blue, a neon blue, and he lets it ease up over his feet without protest, and does not object even when it begins to lick away at his ankles, or lap up over his knees, tendrils of it exploring his swimtrunks and rising up over each vertebrae of his spinal column. Only when it pulls him does he become alarmed, and he sees that the water is suddenly a deep, stagnant green, and he struggles back toward the shore, but his feet slip on the scummy surface of the submerged sand, and he is pulled farther away from the beach and from the bathers with their brilliant, formless faces, and soon he is no longer a part of that life, which is receding rapidly, as if it never was.

* * *

His marriage ended when Scott decided now would be a good time to have children.

“We never, ever, wanted to have children,” Eileen said fiercely, as if he needed to be told, as if he was a crazy person now and had to be periodically reminded of the realities of life.

“Well, we never really agreed...” he began, weakly, knowing she would think it was just like a man to introduce irrelevant legalities. He used to think men and women were very much alike, that any perceived differences were simply a matter of sexual politics. He’d been naive.

“We didn’t have to agree. It’s always been so obvious to both of us, from the very beginning.”

“But things change. A lot of things have changed, and now I think I want children. You’re only twenty-nine; it’s not too late.”

“Scott, I’ve stood by you. You can’t say I haven’t.”

“And I’m grateful. I think children would be good for the both of us. They’ll make us look forward.”

“My god... Scott...”

“They’ll make us look at things more positively. We’re woefully short on positive outlook around here.”

“My god, Scott. You have cancer. You want me to have kids, and then raise them by myself?”

He stared at her. She’d just told him he was going to die. Well, everyone was going to die, why was he being such a kid about it? She’d never acknowledged it before, not even when he himself had spoken it out loud. But she didn’t know. Nobody knew. “No,” he replied. “No” to every notion passing through her head. Then he’d left the room, and their marriage. It had been an unreasonable response on his part, but chaos had passed into his body, and he did not believe it would ever leave.

Infiltration, carcinoma... The men and women in their white coats had used the words so elegantly, as if reciting deeply felt poetry, or intoning prayers in some rare dialect before a congregation anxious for enlightenment. Metastatic, diffusely spreading, degree of penetration, invasion. Surgical resection with regional lymphadenectomy was the treatment of choice for stage two gastric cancer. He decided to forego the clinical trials, pretending to family and friends a cure had taken place.

And maybe it had. Who could know? Strangeness ran through his body, and in madness his body had begun to eat itself, but who could say that the strangeness would always be alien to him?

* * *

They continued to live together. She travelled with him to doctors, shopping, the occasional movie. She was loyal to the end, and it pained him that that wasn’t enough. He’d left her in his head, and could not find his way back. And he wasn’t even sure she knew.

Then this vacation together. She thought it would do him some good. She didn’t say it would do “us” some good because he knew she wasn’t really looking forward to spending time out in public with her dying husband. She was a good person; she was genuinely concerned about his welfare. She should get away before he poisoned her.

There’d been no warning. Symptoms had been insignificant. Sometimes a slight pain when he ate a little too much, but who hadn’t felt that at one time or other? Now and then a little difficulty swallowing, but he’d always been too emotional, always on the verge of having that lump in his throat. Later on he thought he had an ulcer— he didn’t relax enough. But who could relax, the way the world was?

And the way the world was, was indifferent.

He’d never brought up having children again. He knew it was the selfish urge of someone who was dying. No good for her, or for any potential children for that matter. What would he do with children anyway? What would they do?

They would watch him die. That, he realised, was what he wanted. The young bear witness to the passing of the old. That was the way it happened the world over.

And beyond that, there was this flesh of his that would continue to walk the careless and uncaring world. Egocentric reasoning, perhaps. After he’d been diagnosed, an elderly neighbour had dropped by to discuss his own terminal illness. He wanted Scott to know that things never really ended, that they simply changed into something else. “There is a reality beyond the everyday,” the man had said. “We are all part of something larger. We are each one face of that which has many faces. What we see today, in this life, is only part of the story, no more than an illusion of the truth.” Instead of being reassured, however, Scott had been terrified. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of my flesh, a voice had intoned in his evening’s dream. Scott had never sought to be a part of anything.

The fear was a bad reason to have kids, but he couldn’t quite let it go.

* * *

A child wasn’t going to happen, but he could still imagine it—how it would look, the sound of its voice. There would be a strangeness about it, surely, but in this child the strangeness would be beautiful. In this child the strangeness would not be a frightening thing.

There had been no reason for him to get sick, no reason at all. He had done nothing wrong. He had exercised, he had watched what he ate. He’d been so careful with everything put into his mouth Eileen often said he appeared to be taking the sacrament. You just never could tell what they put into food these days. Some of it was never even meant to be food. Not for normal people. Now Eileen cooked with soy and they ate as much fish as possible, but he never could feel comfortable eating fish, wondering from what depths they came.

Every night at the Shores he would look out over the ocean, gaze down where the water lapped and drifted back, half-expecting some child to emerge from the waves after its long swim home.

“Beautiful... beautiful,” he would say.

Then came the night she caught him during his admiration, heard him call the boggy green expanse beautiful. “That’s crazy, Scott. Look at it—it’s like floating rot. You can’t swim in it—you can’t even walk through it.”

He turned to her with a small smile, the largest he could muster in these times. “Then maybe you can walk on it,” he said, hoping to make her even angrier. “I see you’ve decided not to enjoy our little vacation after all.”

She ran back into the room, crying. He still smiled—he couldn’t get the smile off his face. But he felt terrible. He was a jerk, she should leave him. Why wasn’t she leaving him?

He turned back to the great, dark, crumbling shore, the slow-moving tide a deep greenish-brown even in moonlight. Fertile, abundant with life, eating itself and eating itself until one day there would be no more. He wondered when Nature had stopped having rules.

The next morning he found the body of a large dog washed up on the shore, a sizeable piece chewed out of its side. Another morning it was a syringe placed upright in the sand like a crucifix. Still another day something long and serpentine had wriggled its way up and down the beach, leaving patterns like words, a drawn-out nyarlathhhh... followed by extended obliterations. He didn’t show Eileen any of this. She stayed locked in their bedroom, crying. She loved him, and he no longer deserved her. He was worried about how he might treat her in the future—there seemed to be no rules for behaviour any more.

Finally one morning she came out for breakfast, her eyes red but dry. She brought along the morning newspaper, again The Shores. “It says here that the towns along this section of coast have had an unusually high birth rate over the past five years. Nobody can explain it.”

He stared at her. The eggs in his mouth tasted funny, but most food did these days. He wasn’t even sure he should be eating eggs. He’d paid little attention to the diet they’d handed him. Eileen would know, but now she was proffering up some sort of conversational gambit. He owed her a reply. “Any details about these births... um...” The egg clung to the inside of his mouth and would not go down. “Anomalies, that sort of thing?”

She seemed to be staring at his mouth. He wondered if she understood his problem with the bit of egg. It felt mobile against his tongue, as if alive. He thought he felt a vestige of pseudopod, tried to wrest the thought from his mind.

“What... what do you mean?” She stammered slightly, but was still in control. Obviously the wrong thing for him to say. But now he was stuck having to explain himself.

“Um... congenital malformations,” said awkwardly about the egg. “Birth...” a hard swallow and it was down. “...defects.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, staring at him. He could feel the cold sweat trickling down his forehead. “There’s nothing about that sort of thing at all.”

“Then...” He took a quick swallow of juice, acid burn all the way down the oesophagus, whatever his stomach had become in flames. God, he thought, ordinary food is poison to me now. “The babies... they all turned out normal.”

She smiled a little, and now it was he doing the staring. It was the first smile he’d seen on her in days—and it looked good. “Well, as normal as any of us can turn out, I suppose. I mean, the article didn’t mention birth defect incidence, any of that... I, well it’s been making me think—I’ve been thinking—oh, Scott, I’ve just decided you’re right, we should have a child, we should have it now.”

He should have refused, of course. People don’t change their minds about something so important so quickly. But if he’d learned anything in recent months it was that intention mattered little, and desire mattered less. He smiled at her, then looked for something to do. He picked up his fork and played with the remains of the egg but could not bring himself to eat any more. He couldn’t even touch the glass containing the yellow acid. Finally his hand rested on the newspaper she’d left folded on the table. He picked it up. “You’re sure?” he asked, opening it.

“Well, I’m a little scared about it, I admit. I mean, who wouldn’t be? A decision like this.” She twisted her napkin, not quite able to meet his eyes. “But I’m... scared a lot of the time. I guess we both are.” He could tell she was waiting for confirmation from him. He wanted to help her out, but he just couldn’t. “You’ve made me very happy,” he said, and it seemed strangely false, formal. He covered by fussing with the paper. After an indecent pause, he said, “It says here there was another fish kill off Innsmouth.”

He waited for her to say something. He kept his eyes on the paper. Finally, “Innsmouth?”

“You know, a few miles up the shore? We passed it on the way down here. It was the last city before the big billboard.”

“I don’t remember a billboard.”

“Well, I thought I pointed it out. I meant to.”

“Do they say what killed the fish?” He could hear the strain in her voice, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the paper. There was a two-page spread on the fish kill, which seemed odd—they were just fish, after all. But there were a number of pictures: the dark corpses piled up like in those World War II newsreels, stretched out on the sand with all their wedge-shaped heads in a row, one old man holding a large fish in his lap as if it were his drowned child. In the background, in the sand, a filigree of dark lettering.

“No... no. Says here it’s a mystery. ‘Local biologists stumped,’ it says. Hey,” he smiled and looked up. “So how many places have their own, local biologist?”

“I... I don’t know,” she said softly. “Do you think we should let him swim?”

“Come again?”

“The baby, should we let him near the water?”

* * *

Eileen had wanted to leave their “filthy” city for years. Actually it was “those filthy people” she’d wanted to leave. Ironic that she insisted they remain at The Shores to have the baby, where the water was so polluted she was afraid to walk closer than fifty feet or so, and even then she held her swollen belly protectively and averted her face. After coming to this decision so reluctantly, she had no intention of going anywhere until it had come to completion. Scott supposed it was some sort of nesting instinct, but he found it completely unexpected from her. He himself didn’t want her to walk there, but he would have been hard-pressed to explain why.

Even though Scott couldn’t work, or couldn’t bring himself to, they still had some savings, and Eileen had inheritance from her parents, so they’d be okay for at least a year or so. Scott couldn’t imagine living much past the baby’s birth. Not that he was sure he was going to die—he just couldn’t imagine living.

The Shores was a lonely place past the tourist season. People they did business with every day—the grocer, the pharmacist, the manager of the beachfront cabin they’d moved to—had grown noticeably less friendly once Scott and Eileen revealed their plans. “Gets pretty cold and windy, especially if you’re not used to it, especially if you’re pregnant,” the pharmacist had said when filling Scott’s prescription of painkillers. “Don’t know that I’d want to put my wife through that.”

“We’re not likely to have everything you’re going to need,” the grocer had added several hours later. “See, I order in limited quantity, because I usually know who my customers are going to be.”

Only the withered and palsied doctor they’d found to guide Eileen through the pregnancy seemed friendly at all, but his garrulousness seemed to have more to do with Eileen’s forthcoming “miracle of birth” than with the patient herself. “The cells, they’re dividing, multiplying even as we speak. Amazing, isn’t it!” He touched her exposed belly with thin fingers that shook and skittered about like a spider’s legs on glass. “Right about now the little one has a webbed-looking hand, no different from what a pig’s foot looks like, about this stage. And imagine, a few weeks back they both had fins.” Scott watched anxiously as the doctor poked and prodded some more, then suddenly thrust his wrinkled ear up to Eileen’s belly. “You can almost hear the little fellow say, ‘I’m no pig, Doctor Linden! At least I don’t think I am!’” He laughed. “Actually, he has no idea what he is right now, and who knows, maybe he’ll fool us all!”

“Well, I hardly think so,” Eileen offered, gently easing herself away from the doctor’s head.

“What I’m saying, dear lady, is that the little one’s body is in flux right now. If you were to observe this new face closely you would see a countenance of barely controlled chaos, fiercely set against the imposed orders of our everyday world. The nose must migrate from somewhere atop the head. The mouth and jaws travel out of the brachial arches. The eyes lie at the sides of his head like his cousin’s, the fish. They creep up front in stealth, as if ashamed to declare their difference. The ears, why, who knows what songs they hear, songs that we...”

“Is she healthy, doctor?” Scott interrupted.

“Well, I can’t say now if it’s a she or a he, but perhaps with the ultrasound...”

“My wife, doctor. Is my wife okay?”

Dr. Linden looked up at Eileen’s face quizzically, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I imagine she is,” he replied.

* * *

They always walked back from the doctor’s office through the small street of shops, because Eileen insisted that some exercise was good for her pregnancy. Scott was doubtful; she looked pale, especially against this backdrop of dark, burnt-looking wooden structures, but she would not be dissuaded. Nor would she pause by any structure for a breather. Now and then they would see someone—usually a fisherman in his rubber slicker—but this was increasingly rare. There were no CLOSED or OPEN signs in any of the doors, although Scott sometimes could detect yellowish light in the distant recesses of a shop or two. He supposed the locals just knew, and strangers had to find out.

By mid-afternoon each day an artificial twilight had set in, due to cloud cover rolling in from the bay. He hurried her along as fast as he thought safe. Once the clouds came in, everything smelled like rotting fish.

Around her sixth month of pregnancy, they started finding the eggs. “Eggs” was what Eileen called them, and that was what she’d convinced herself they were, but Scott had serious doubts. They seemed too large, and too deliberate. “Someone makes these things, honey, or several someones do. Look, that one has a signature on it.” He tugged on the object, jarring it loose from the sandy stretch in front of their cabin where they’d discovered it the previous day. It was heavier than it looked, another detail convincing him they were either carved or manufactured, perhaps part of some local festival. No doubt the locals worked on these things all year, in their garages and basements, bringing them out at a preordained time of the year, planting them like the objects of a giant’s Easter egg hunt. He’d ask the manager of the cabins for confirmation, if he could ever find the fellow—they hadn’t seen him in weeks.

The egg-shaped object had an odd centre of gravity. It shifted under his hands and he had to struggle to control it. Dangerously off-balance, he bumped into Eileen, almost knocking her down. “God, I’m sorry.” He wheezed, and ridiculously felt on the verge of tears. “There, see? A signature.” He played his fingers over the back of the egg where a line of squiggles had been pressed into its surface.

“Are you sure that’s a signature, hon? It’s pretty hard to read.”

“You saw Dr. Linden’s handwriting on your prescription didn’t you? No better than this. In fact it looks damned similar, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one he made.”

“If you’re right about the local celebration.”

“Well, celebration or not, someone is making these things. Now look at that one over there.” He led her over to a bend in the gravel and shell road that wound through the spare trees behind the cabins. “Look at all that decorative filigree. You can’t tell me that’s random chance at work. Besides this one’s a little bigger, and shaped a bit differently.” He bent and placed her hand on the pattern. She jerked back as if shocked.

“It feels weird,” she said, looking around nervously. “I see a few more over by those trees. I wonder how many of these things there are, anyway.”

“Just a few, I think. I mean, how many locals can there be? Full-time residents of The Shores? Not more than three dozen, I would think.”

* * *

But the number of “eggs” they found around the cabin and especially on their daily walks down the beach doubled, doubled again, and doubled again. Eileen stopped mentioning them, and after awhile even stopped looking at them as far as Scott could tell.

Scott could look at little else. The round tops of the eggs made a knobbed carpet from the back of the beach up the grassy slope to the rocks beyond, and he could see a scattering wedged precariously on the high cliffs above. Sometimes they had to veer out of the way of some glacier-like encroachment of eggs onto the beach, stepping into the mossy edges of the water more than once. He did so with trepidation; Eileen simply marched on with no change in expression.

Eileen was changing: her breasts swelling, her belly dropping lower, hips and pelvis spreading. Now and then he could see blotches, broken blood vessels in her face. She looked into the mirror with distaste; often she didn’t look into the mirror at all. She was gorgeous. But if he looked only at her belly: the high, tight roundness of it all, he could think only of the eggs filling the landscape around them, and he had to look away as well.

Eileen had gone from asking him about his own health, his own pains and sensations, his own feelings from several times a day to once, to every week or two, to not at all. He thought it just as well. There was painful activity going on inside which his pills only vaguely and intermittently assuaged.

One evening he watched as the dark green tide drifted out of the bay and over the sand, farther than it ever had before, covering the grass and lower rocks, seeping through old abandoned beachfront structures whose torn walls were like shredded wounds, creeping almost all the way up to the access road to their cabin. The next morning he was still there on the deck, watching as the tide rolled out, leaving thousands upon thousands of new eggs behind.

* * *

“I can’t leave. The baby will be here any day,” she said. “I have to get ready.”

“Eileen, look what’s happening here. We have to get out!”

She held on to each side of her belly, swollen like an overripe fruit, extending her palms as if to shield the baby’s ears from the argument. “I don’t know what’s happening here, Scott, and neither do you. I haven’t known what was happening since you got the cancer. A lot of things are happening that are just completely out of our control, things we don’t seem to be able to do one thing about. But I can control how I carry this baby, and I’m not going to risk leaving now. You don’t what those things out there are, anyway.”

“They’re eggs, just like you said in the first place. Huge eggs, an enormous multitude of them. They’ll be filling the roads soon, and then there’ll be no way out of here.”

“All the more reason not to risk the travel. Besides, what makes you think they’ll harm us in any way? They’re eggs, Scott. Just like this baby used to be. And now this big belly of mine is as firm and tight as one of those shells. Maybe you’re feeling you’re not quite ready for this—I can certainly understand that. But this baby is going to happen, Scott.”

They hashed it over a couple more times before he gave up and left. He didn’t want to upset her by pushing too hard. He was already upset enough for the both of them. His pain had increased over the last several days—there was this enormous pressure, and he’d been able to eat hardly a thing. Eileen’s appetite, of course, had grown prodigious. He didn’t think she’d even noticed when he hadn’t touched his own food.

He was running into the little village to find the doctor, hoping maybe he could talk some sense into her. She’d always paid attention to doctors—she’d hung on every word his own doctors had said, treating them as if they were priests. He bounded onto the darkened sidewalk, running full speed into a tall figure in a damp raincoat.

The odour in his face was old and stale. He peered up into the damp face of his landlord, whose nostrils widened at Scott’s proximity. The man’s eyes appeared oddly wide and filmy, and his face had greyed since Scott had seen him last. Flecks of dry skin layered his cheeks. “Eileen,” Scott began anxiously. “My wife, I can’t get her to leave.”

The man’s voice was blubbery, a frothy translation. “No... one... asked you...”

“You’re local, that might have some sort of authority with her. You can tell her about the eggs, what they really are.”

“No... one... asked you... to stay...”

“But our child...”

“But... our... chill... dren...” His landlord pushed away.

The doctor’s office was locked, though through the glass door Scott saw a bare bulb glowing yellow in the waiting room ceiling. Shadows slithered across the back wall that led to the examining rooms. He began to shout, then beat on the pane until it splintered. No response, and the shadows continued their distant dance. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around the room. One had spilled, the cascade of papers left to drift across the centre rug. Ultrasounds. Curved shapes, vague, radiating lines. Faces and almost faces in the thousands.

Scott turned away from the doctor’s door and began beating on the door of the next shop in the row. After almost an hour Scott had been unable to rouse anyone out of any of the dark little shops. If anyone had heard him, they obviously didn’t care to help. As he headed back toward the cabin he had to side-step a number of eggs which had not been in his path before. He kicked one out of the way, just for the hell of it. Heavy as stone. He yelped and stumbled, watching the egg rock back and forth before settling itself onto its broad side. Cloud cover had filled in every gap of sky since his departure. Distant lightning illuminated edges of thunderhead. As far as he could see before him a tide of eggs rose and fell over the hills and pastures, gathering beneath and climbing to the lower boughs of trees. Growing, developing, dividing and complicating in ways unimaginable, a chaos of life uncaring, far beyond anything he might possibly comprehend. Infiltrating carcinoma, diffusely spreading metastases... Sometimes knowing the truth was not better. Sometimes the truth made an irrelevance of our lives.

When it began raining he tried to walk a little faster, but a road to walk on became increasingly rare. Egg pushed against egg until all repositioned and spread from horizon to horizon until half the visible world had been filled in. Lightning flashes showed off the innate lustre of the shells, as increasing downpour made the curves change, lengthen and soften. He stepped up on their backs gingerly at first, going from egg to egg as if crossing a stream on oily round stones.

Then he heard Eileen’s voice calling through the slam of rain and he stepped hard and smashed and pushed forward with shoes caught in the breaking shells. He fell again and again with hands in goo and fierce activity snapping at his fingers but no matter because Eileen was screaming now against the crash of the shores and sky.

Pain ripped through his belly so completely infiltrated now he could not distinguish between stomach and pain, pain and colon and oesophagus in a confusion of cells. Around him seethed an ocean of the newborn, sliding easily through shell wall, eye and claw-foot and tentacle, and all of them different, all of them distinguishable, a thousand faces of the thousand forms.

“Scott!” She screamed and he saw her rise up in tatters, their child but one more child who would never know or understand or care who its parents had been.

But still he ran and smashed and bled to hold these tatters of her in awe. He closed his eyes in a last pathetic attempt to shut out the truth as around him the chaos that was the true face of the world turned and ate of itself again and again, the new bearing but brief witness to the old as their flesh grows thin, thinner still, and dissolves.