Shadows Over Innsmouth

“Are you expecting something to go wrong?” I asked as I turned the vehicle.

“Perhaps.” He lit another flat Turkish cigarette.

My friend smoked in silence for some minutes then said, “At least I now know what happened to Priscus.”

“Not a common soldier?” I asked.

Calloway wound down the window and threw out his cigarette stub. “Far from common.”

I waited for more, then grew impatient. “You’d better tell me what you know.”

Calloway nodded. “In the first century AD, during the reign of Vespasian, the family Priscus was wiped out along with all retainers and slaves, and their names were expunged from the records, even from those archives going back to the early Republic. And all because of Vitellius Priscus, whom I believe to be the occupant of that tomb back there.

“If any professional historian has heard of Priscus, it will only be as an unsubstantiated legend. But within certain occult circles his story is well known.

“Vitellius Priscus was a patrician and a high-ranking army officer. He was a good soldier and unlike many of his class he chose not to linger in the decadence that was Rome. He loved to campaign in distant lands, he loved to see action. He had a reputation as a scholar, too, and was once a protege of Petronius Arbiter, although he sensibly ended that friendship when Petronius fell foul of Nero.

“As long as he could avoid offending any of the more insane Caesars, his future was assured. In time, he was awarded an assistant governorship in Egypt.

“It was there that Priscus changed. His scholarship and natural curiosity led him into a study of the occult. He fell in with a strange and clandestine sect of Egyptian priests and became their most willing pupil. It is said that his was one of those rare talents that climbs swiftly and without hindrance into the highest occult grades. And like most who experience this effortless rise, he chose to follow the path of evil.

“His occult legacy is The Twenty-one Essays, in which he claimed to have lived and experienced abominations repellent even to the most jaded of Roman voluptuaries. The book was proscribed and further military advancement curtailed. At the time, his family still had influence sufficient to ensure his survival, but Priscus was banished to Britain.

“Simultaneously, there was gossip about Priscus, whispers that he was changing physically, becoming a ‘demon’.

“The last thing that’s known for certain is that Priscus arrived in Britain. He was never heard of again and his family was eliminated.

“With what we have seen today, this is what I think must have happened. Somehow, while in Egypt, Priscus had become infected with an alien strain, just like the Innsmouth people. Priscus was crucified and interred in that barrow—I imagine that the Romans and the druids colluded to destroy what both saw as a menace.

“And there you have it. Now, Roderick, if you don’t mind, I am going to have a nap. Wake me when we get to Southdown.”

***

I went away after that for a couple of months, going to a monastery in France to aid an independent investigation into certain alleged malpractices.

I returned home one afternoon, weary and looking forward to a few days of relaxation. My immediate plans included a hot bath and an early supper, followed by an evening in my favourite armchair with The Pickwick Papers and a glass of The Glenlivet. I pondered taking a few days off, perhaps to go fishing, for I had worked hard while in France. My curates were able men and could well carry on without me.

I had barely started to unpack when there was a sharp rap at my door and in stalked the housekeeper.

Mrs. Byrne’s usually jovial face was compressed with vexation.

“It’s himself! Professor Calloway!” she announced. “Demanding to see you and will not take no for an answer.”

“Not busy, are you Roderick?” boomed Calloway as I walked into the study. “I’m sure you can spare me a few days, three or four at the most.”

“Really, Reuben,” I protested. “I’ve only just returned from France. I have a parish to run and I can’t go dashing off again.” My conscience nudged me, a reminder that I had intended to do exactly that.

“Rubbish!” snapped my friend. “Young Father What’s-his-name, or the other one, they’ve managed all this time without you. They’ll cope for a little longer.”

“It’s hardly fair to them...” my voice tailed off as my guilty conscience again reminded me of my intentions.

“Look, I’ll just go and wait in the Rolls while you pack a few things,” said Calloway, knowing that he had won with very little trouble. “Keep it simple and casual. Oh, and dark and hard-wearing.”

Minutes later I climbed in beside Calloway and threw my small holdall onto the back seat, where there was already a compact bundle.

“Thank you, Roderick,” said Calloway, as he attempted to steer onto the main road and light one of his dreadful cigarettes at the same time. “It’s good to have someone with me whom I can trust.”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, didn’t I say? We’re going to Lower Bedhoe.”

“Something has happened at the dig,” I said.

He nodded. “Last week I had a call from that American lad, Porter. He’s not at the dig any more and he’s anxious about what might be going on there. I got Porter to come and see me and I recorded what he had to say. Listen.”

Calloway loaded an audio cassette into the car’s unit and pressed the play button. Ken Porter’s voice came from the speakers, hesitant at first as if unused to speaking into a microphone, then gaining in confidence as he proceeded.

“It was about a month after your visit that we broke through into the tomb,” Porter started. “That may seem a long time to a layman, but in archaeological work you must go carefully so that you don’t damage anything important.

“The earth was packed solidly around the boulder which sealed the tomb and when we had cleaned all the dirt away we found that the gap between the stone and the portal was sealed with some form of cement which was in good condition and very hard.

“It was decided to concentrate at first on removing a small section of the seal, perhaps about five or six inches. Once we had broken through that we should be able to see if there was any danger of damaging the tomb’s contents. If the area behind the seal seemed to be clear, then we could remove the remainder with more vigour.

“When we started to chip away, we found that the cement was quite thick. It took several of us, working in relays, a couple of days to get through. You have been in that cramped, stuffy place and so you can probably guess what it was like. Doctor Wayt stuck it out well, staying down there most of the time to supervise.

“At last we judged that there was the thinnest layer of the seal left to remove. We all agreed that the honour of the final breakthrough should go to Doctor Wayt. He demurred, but it was his dig, which his persistence had made possible, and so we persuaded him.

“As many of us as possible huddled into that confined space before the sepulchre, all waiting eagerly for the great moment, while the remainder crowded about the entrance to the barrow.

“Wayt took a hammer and chisel and carefully tapped round the edges of the remaining piece of the barrier. It gave and fell into the tomb and there was a small crashing sound as it shattered on the inside ground. ‘Sounds like they must have gone to the trouble of constructing a stone floor in there,’ Doctor Wayt told us. ‘Somebody pass me a flashlight and I’ll take a look.’

“He held the light high and to the right and put his face as close to the freshly-opened gap as was possible. Then we heard a sort of puffing or hissing noise and Wayt cried out before falling back in a swoon. There were a few startled shouts and some muted panic, and I heard someone say, ‘He must have inhaled bad air!’

“Now here is a strange thing, Professor Calloway, which I cannot explain. I was to Doctor Wayt’s left, crouched inside the door’s frame, and I had a good view of his torchlit profile as he leaned forward to that gap. It looked to me as if something gushed out from that hole in the seal and settled itself all over Doctor Wayt’s face. He made a choking noise as if he had inhaled it.

“I don’t know what it was, if anything. It seemed to be a black, drifting, shadowy mass, like a cloud of dust or cobwebs. But when we got him into the daylight, there were no traces of anything around his nose and mouth other than the sweat and grime one would have expected.

“Perhaps it was some kind of optical illusion; the darkness, the cramped conditions, the narrow beam of the flashlight, all of these could have contributed to what I thought I saw.

“I started to tell one of the kids to go for a doctor but just about then Wayt recovered a little and countermanded my order. He said something about a fainting fit caused by heat and cramp and that he would just rest in his tent until he felt well again.

“He stayed there all night and in the morning he seemed recovered although rather subdued. Doctor Wayt was always an ebullient man and the change was very marked. He suggested that as we had all worked hard recently, that we take a couple of days off. I queried this—after all, since I’d known him he’d been quite a workaholic. He told me with some asperity that the tomb had been there for a couple of thousand years, that it would wait a bit longer for us.

“He just lazed around for several days, then he extended our holiday and asked me if I would mind taking him to London on my motorbike. Said he wanted to do some research at the British Museum Library. Turned out that we were in London for four days. I was able to lodge with some friends but I don’t know where Wayt stayed.

“Then when we got back to the dig, the Doctor, in effect, fired the lot of us. Well, not quite the lot of us, he kept several people on. Wasn’t much that we could do, so we all upped our tents and went.

“But I wasn’t happy, the whole thing felt wrong to me. During those few days in London, Doctor Wayt changed a lot. He became unpleasant in manner and acted kind of furtive. Then... it was odd about those he kept on.”

“Odd in what way?” interjected Calloway’s voice.

“Well, for a start they were the least experienced of the students. Then they were all foreigners—by that I mean that there were no British or Americans or any other native English speakers. There were two girls from mainland China and a Ugandan guy. Yeah, and something else funny, they were the smallest and skinniest kids there, none of them much use for heavy work.

“Don’t know why, I felt kind of... creepy about it. I went back one night to have a mooch around. There was nobody there, there was nothing there save for Wayt’s big, old-fashioned tent. Then I heard some noises, distant like they came from over the hill.”

“What kind of noises?” Calloway again.

“I don’t know. Weird, kinda like chanting.”

“Did you investigate?”

“Hell, no!” Porter gabbled. “I suddenly got real scared, lit out of there. Then I remembered what you said about calling you.”

The voice stopped and there was the hiss of blank tape. I reached out to switch the machine off.

“Have you done anything yet?” I asked Calloway.

“I called a friend at the Museum and found out what Wayt was doing there. He was consulting the Al Azif and some other hideous books.”

Calloway had once told me about the Al Azif. I turned to look at him. His face was grim. “And that worries you,” I said.

He fumbled with his cigarette case. “And that worries me,” he agreed.

***

We drove straight through Lower Bedhoe without stopping. I don’t think that anyone paid attention to us but it had been some time and two men in a battered old Rolls-Royce probably look totally different from two men in a battered old Land Rover. Instead of driving directly to the camp-site, Calloway drove the Rolls into the small car park at the rear of the youth hostel.

We climbed out of the car and Calloway stretched his huge frame until I thought that his scruffy grey suit would come apart at the seams. “A pleasant summer’s evening, Roderick,” he said. “Just the right kind of evening for a stroll up that hill. Of course, we’ll have to detour slightly. It’s better that Wayt doesn’t know we’re here until we call on him a bit later.”

Without bothering to ascertain my feelings about this suggestion, Calloway set off at an astonishing pace for such a grossly-built man. We clambered over a wooden fence and approached the “Dad” hill from the west side. “We won’t have the benefit of that excellent path, I’m afraid,” said Calloway. “I hope that I don’t damage my suit on the brambles.” I kept my uncharitable opinion to myself.

As it happened, the climb was less arduous than I expected, the slope being more gentle from this approach. The brambles were a bit vicious but we were able to avoid the worst patches. Soon we were through the woods and looking down upon the stone circle. “Almost there,” Calloway grunted.

As soon as our feet touched the level turf of the amphitheatre, Calloway dashed over to the flat stone and began to examine the ground. “Come here, Shea,” he called. When I reached him, he was indicating small patches where the grass had been trampled and crushed.

“There’s been a struggle here,” I said.

“Yes, and look at that... and there... and again there...” Calloway pointed to a number of ominous brown stains on the flattened grass and on the altar stone itself. Comment was unnecessary. I crossed myself and muttered a quiet prayer, for whom or what I wasn’t sure.

“One more thing.” Calloway led me to the barrow and we squeezed our way in, illumination provided by the flicker of his cigarette lighter. The huge rock was still in its place sealing the tomb of Priscus. The jambs’ carvings goggled at us, looking even more lifelike in the dancing glow shed by the tiny flame. Calloway jerked his head towards the entrance and we crawled out.

“No more work done,” I said, brushing the dirt from my trousers. My friend stood tapping a Turkish cigarette on his thumbnail and then for the first time since I had known him, replaced it in his case unlit.

“Let’s go and have a word with Wayt,” he said quietly.

We went back through the woods and this time down by the beaten path. We circled the solitary marquee, sole remnant of the camp which had been here, and approached from the front. Despite the warmth of the evening the flap was closed, and yet muted noises from within told us that the huge tent was not unoccupied.

“Hello in there!” called Calloway.

“What’s that! Who’s there?” The startled voice was that of Wayt but there was something different about it. It was coarser somehow, as if he was in the early stages of laryngitis.

“It’s Calloway.”

“What do you want? How dare you come here without permission!”

Calloway had been toying with the tent-flap and now he threw it open. “It would be better if we could talk face-to-face,” he said.

The evening light did not penetrate very far into the marquee. From where I stood behind Calloway, part of the trestle table was visible, enough for me to see that it was covered with notebooks and sheets of paper, many of them illustrated with geometric patterns and scribed with copious notes. There was a hand resting on the table, a hand which was snatched back with some haste as the light poured in.

I had a glimpse only, but I saw that there was something wrong with that hand. I had an impression of some unpleasant skin disease, psoriasis perhaps. The area beyond the table was heavily shaded and I could see only the faintest outline of a seated figure.

“Get out!” Wayt screamed.

Calloway’s voice was affable. “But I came here to offer more help,” he purred. “I thought that if we worked together we could solve the riddle of those weird carvings.”

There was a bark of laughter from inside the tent. “You fool, Calloway! I don’t need your help! I don’t want your help! I’ve found the answer to that riddle already. I know exactly what those carvings mean. It’s something too immense for your peasant intellect, so go away and leave me be. I have important work to do.”

“Of course,” soothed Calloway. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” He beckoned me away and we trudged back to the road. My friend was full of surprises this evening. First the unlighted cigarette and now this uncharacteristic capitulation.

“Did you notice Wayt’s hand?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Calloway. “Interesting, wasn’t it?”

We reached the Rolls and I said, “Now what?”

Calloway had been gazing around at the landscape and now he pointed to a gentle rise about one-third of a mile back towards Lower Bendoe. “I think that would make a good camping site,” he said.

“Camping site?”

Calloway reached into the back of the car and took out my holdall together with the second bundle I had noticed earlier. Handing me the latter, he said, “That’s your tent. I’ve got a box of supplies for you and I’m leaving you a good pair of night-glasses.”

“Calloway, would you mind telling me what is going on?”

Reuben Calloway looked at me as if I were simple. “Why, you’re going to keep an eye on Wayt while I go to London to check on a few things. I also want to have a word with a certain occultist. I think that he will be able to lend me something very important.”

***

Calloway was right. The rise did make a good camping spot, giving me an advantageous overview of Wayt’s tent while remaining unseen myself. Calloway must have searched hard for the small tent which he had forced upon me, for its colour blended perfectly with the surrounding vegetation. I had protested against Calloway’s presumption to no avail. Confident of his rightness, he would hear no argument. I agreed at last, for I knew that he was quite capable of presenting a fait accompli by leaping into the Rolls and leaving me stranded if I persisted in opposing his wishes.

“I’m sure that you won’t have to worry about the daylight hours,” he told me. “If my suspicions are correct, Wayt won’t venture out while it’s light for fear of being observed. So you’ll be able to rest during the day and watch him at night. I am equally sure that nothing will happen for at least the next two nights by which time I should be back here. And Roderick, be careful. You’re an observer. No action of any kind except as a final resort.”

As a priest I try to practise tolerance and charity. As a human being I sometimes resent both Calloway’s arrogance and his propensity to be right so often. We are good friends but I can appreciate why many find him intolerable.

During the day I rested. When I ate and drank, it was cold tinned food and bottled mineral water, for I did not want to risk a fire or cooking smells which could attract Wayt’s attention. At night I dressed in denims, sweater and windcheater, all black, and lurked amidst the undergrowth with the binoculars trained on Wayt’s tent.

Either Wayt, too, rested in the day or else he could tolerate darkness far more comfortably than most, for it was not until the darkest hours that any light would show in the tent. Then I would see his shadow, distorted by the feeble glow and the canvas walls, moving about or crouched over his table all night.

I almost missed his exit from the marquee on the third night. It was well after midnight and bright with stars, so much more clear and plentiful there in the countryside, but the moon had not yet appeared. I was becoming bored and every now and then, for a few moments, I would turn the binoculars to the night sky, enchanted with God’s universe. I turned back just in time to see the light extinguished. The night-glasses to my eyes, I strained to see what was happening.

I glimpsed a slight movement, the flap of the tent being lifted, I presume, and then a patch of shadow moving towards the far side of the smaller hill where it turned towards the road.

Despite Calloway’s promise, he had not yet returned. I felt obliged to do what he would have done. I jumped to my feet and began to run towards the road, caution abandoned. I hoped that Wayt would have no reason to turn back and that if he did, he would not see me.

I reached the fence, hauled myself over and squatted in the shallow ditch by the verge. With great care I lifted my head, binoculars at the ready and fixed on the road. I did not know which direction Wayt would take but thought that I could give him a few minutes to come my way before setting off in pursuit.

Then, black against the light metalled surface of the road, I could see a dark figure drawing near. I was sure that it could only be Wayt, and yet there was something disturbing about the archaeologist’s appearance. He was swathed in a cloak and hood of dark material, his body was huddled over and he moved with a peculiar, quasi-hopping gait. I wriggled further down into the ditch, expecting momentary discovery, but he turned suddenly into the grounds of the youth hostel.

As Wayt moved out of sight, I hurried along until I was opposite the hostel and then again took cover. Within moments my quarry reappeared, this time bearing a large, well-wrapped burden which he handled with ease. He turned back the way he had come and having given him sufficient time to get well ahead, I followed.

Wayt retraced his steps but instead of returning to the marquee, he went directly to the larger hill and started up the path. I followed him with the binoculars until he vanished into the treeline.

Clipping the glasses to my belt, I moved rapidly up the path and plunged into the claustrophobic darkness of the woods. The going was not easy but I believed that I had good enough recall of the way the path ran. Foolishly, I put on a burst of speed and I think that I was almost trotting when a blow to the head knocked me flat on my back. Badly dazed, I could only wait for the coup de grâce.

Nothing happened. I’m not sure how long it was that I lay there but probably no more than seconds. It became apparent that I had not been assaulted but had run into a heavy lower limb protruding from one of those immense old trees. I crawled to its base and hauled myself up, disorientated and struggling against nausea.

I leaned against the bole and raised a hand to my head. There was a swelling above my right eye, very tender to the touch, with wetness on my brow and cheek. Blood, no doubt, from abraded skin. I set off again in what I thought was the right direction, only more slowly this time, holding my arms out before me to fumble a way through the murk and tangle of branches and bushes, taking great care not to suffer further disaster.

I became aware of a strange noise ahead. It sounded like a monotonous, wordless chant, interrupted every few notes by a chilling wail, a high-pitched ululation which dried my mouth and knotted my stomach. This might have been what young Porter heard when he came to investigate. I understood now why he had felt panic, for it took all of my will power to carry on.

The forest began to thin out and the darkness to lessen, and suddenly I emerged into the open. By some good fortune I was more or less where I had intended to be, near to the head of the track leading down to the tomb of Priscus. There was no need for immediate concealment, it being unlikely that my black-garbed figure would be visible against the gloomy backdrop of trees.

Cold stars glittered and almost in front of me a full moon shone. Although yet very low in the sky, it had risen sufficiently to cast a wide ribbon of light over the calm surface of the sea, creating a motley of silver and jet and ultramarine. The glow spilled onto the land, turning the amphitheatre with its stone circle into a gleaming bowl. Below me on the hillside, his singular gait unmistakable, was the misshapen figure of the archaeologist.

He reached the foot of the hill and turned with his burden to the altar stone. I started to follow, and as I did so I saw that in that strip of white light upon the sea there had appeared two or three black silhouettes, looking for all the world like immense flat heads. As I watched, another surfaced and then another. Despite the distance, there was something about those featureless shadows which made me shiver. I reached for the night-glasses but they were no longer at my belt. I must have lost them when I had my accident.

Then I realised that the weird chanting and the intermittent wailing were coming from far out at sea and were getting closer.

My approach down the slope was made more easy by the moonlight. I concentrated on stealth, but I think that Wayt was so intent upon his own business as to be oblivious to all else.

At the bottom I lowered myself onto my stomach and wriggled forward until I was safe within the shadow of a menhir. From the direction of the sea, in addition to the throbbing chant, I could now hear some splashing and there were other sounds, a medley of indistinguishable mutterings interspersed with an occasional coughing croak. Although not necessarily abnormal in themselves, in that place and at that time these new noises made the hair on my neck stiffen.

I peered out from behind my hiding place. Wayt was huddled over the altar stone, his body concealing from my eyes what he had there. His movements suggested that he was arranging something, and I had a morbid mental picture of a mortuary technician laying out a corpse.

There was a slight noise from somewhere behind me, a nocturnal animal or bird, perhaps, up there in the woods. Wayt whirled. His face was fully concealed beneath that heavy hood but I could sense his suspicion. His head swung from side to side as if he were snuffling out prey. Despite my conviction that he could not detect me within the shadow cast by the stone, I pressed my body closer to the ground.

The noise was not repeated and Wayt seemed to relax. For an instant he stood away from the altar and I could see what it was that lay there. Stretched out on that sinister slab, pinioned wrist and ankle, was the naked form of a young woman. She, then, was the burden Wayt had carried, the reason for his detour to the youth hostel. No doubt she was an innocent hiker or cyclist who, if travelling alone, would not be missed as quickly as a local person. She was still and quiet and I guessed that she was either drugged or in a trance. I recalled Calloway’s admonition to do nothing unless and until absolutely necessary.

Wayt turned back to the altar and held both arms out to the heavens. Throwing back his head he commenced to chant some kind of prayer or ritual. It was in no language known to me and it occurred to me that what I could hear was not even of human origin, so bizarre did it sound. I would not even attempt to reproduce those alien syllables. Each time that Wayt paused in his dirge, so there were echoing croaks from the sea, becoming louder as they went on.

Abruptly there was silence and Wayt’s arms fell to his sides. He lowered his head briefly, as if in obeisance, then raised his right arm once more. Now the moonlight flashed on a long, curved blade.

An involuntary cry was torn from me. “No-o-o-o!”

I was on my feet and running hard, covering the short distance between us more quickly than I would have believed myself capable of doing. With both hands I snatched at Wayt’s wrist to prevent that wicked knife from descending.

It may have been that the recent blow to my head had weakened me, but I found myself thwarted by what seemed to be an unnatural strength in that sinewy limb. We grappled for a few seconds and then the knife was flung to one side. Wayt twisted about in my grasp and the cowl flew back from his head, exposing his face to the mocking light of the full moon. I cried out in horror and my grip loosened.

It was Wayt’s face, right enough, but humanity was vestigial. The abhorrent visage into which I stared was bestial, a vile melding of man and amphibian and fish. Black eyes with horizontal yellow irises bulged from surrounding tissue which was covered with scales and warty excrescences; flattened and ridged nostrils flared; and a wide, lipless mouth slobbered at me. Little remained of his beautiful white hair save for a few ropy strands dangling from a scabrous scalp. With an almost casual backhanded cuff the thing knocked me to the rough turf.

“Hah! It’s the priest!” While the words were spat out in understandable English, the guttural voice was throaty and phlegm-filled as if straining to form impossible sounds. “Hardly a worthy opponent for one such as I. Come here, priest!” He reached down with hands which were showing signs of webbing and claw development, seized my collar and lifted me to my feet.

I am a solidly-built man, no lightweight, and yet the man-thing ran me to the cliff’s edge as if I had been a child. I could feel loose soil crumbling beneath my feet and I thought that his intention was to heave me over. Under my breath I muttered a final prayer, preparing to meet a shattering death on the boulders and shingle below.

Instead, Wayt held me firmly with one hand and pointed to the sea with the other. “Look, priest, look there!” he commanded. “See the future and marvel!”

There were now many dozens of those anomalous black shapes in the sea. Some had advanced as far as the shallows and were standing upright so that the water lapped at their knees and waists. Others wallowed in and out of the wavelets on their bellies, grisly travesties of porpoises. It was from all of them that the chanting and ghastly wailing was emanating.

As Wayt dragged me into sight, the cacophony died away until at last there was only an occasional croak from among their ranks. Mostly they just stood, staring in silence.

“My true brethren!” grunted the thing which held me. “Soon, when I have completed the requisite number of sacrifices, I will be fully changed, freed from the limitations of this pitifully short-lived human shell, and I will take my rightful place with them in the bosom of the eternal ocean.

“Imagine, priest, when you and that fat oaf Calloway and all those other pitiful... midgets... are ancient dust forgotten even by your impotent God, I will yet live. I will be here amongst the faithful when the stars are right for the final coming. I will witness the rising of the incomparable Green City from the blackest depths. I will be here to fall in worship when He... He!... emerges from durance in all of his terrible splendour to rule in glory for evermore! Oh mightiest of fathers, hear your servant’s cry!”

He pulled me back from the cliff and towards the altar stone, maintaining that immovable grip, and stared at me thoughtfully. “Yes...” he mused. “Yes, you may be of use to me. Perhaps the offering of a Christian priest will hasten the desired metamorphosis. But first, to finish what I had started with the female!” He cast me aside with ease and bent to retrieve the sacrificial knife.

I fumbled in the pocket of my windcheater to find my crucifix. Overcoming dread and holding the cross aloft, I advanced upon the hideous creature. “In the name of God almighty, stop!” I commanded.

Wayt stared at me, astonished, and then emitted a coughing guffaw. Stepping forward, he again felled me with one of those careless slaps. Kneeling, he snatched the cross from my hand and buckled it in his fingers.

“You fool,” he croaked. “To imagine that your feeble symbol of holiness could deter me.”

“The crucifix won’t,” said a quiet, familiar voice. “But this certainly will.” A huge hand, holding a star-shaped object, thrust between my line of vision and Wayt’s frightening face. Wayt let out a yell of fear and fury and recoiled. He scrambled to his feet and made a dash for the hillside, only to cringe back and run to the precipice. Again, somehow, he was thwarted.

Calloway was helping me to my feet. “Sorry I’m late, Roderick,” he said. “It took a little time to assemble my army. We almost gave away our approach when some damned fool stumbled up on the hill.”

I looked around and saw that Calloway was not alone. There were men with him, ten or more, and all were holding the same starshaped artefact. They had formed a circle about the monstrous Wayt who was now cowering on the ground, whimpering. I recognised some of the men: there was the farm labourer who had directed us and the aggressive blacksmith. I saw the wrinkled shopkeeper and the surly publican. All the others were villagers from Lower Bedhoe.

“You know what to do with him, men,” said Calloway.

“Careful, Reuben, he’s very strong,” I warned.

“Not any more,” said my friend. “These star-stones will ensure that.”

I pulled Calloway to the precipice and pointed out at the sea where the grim multitude waited, now in menacing silence. “Look at those!”

“I’ve seen them,” said Calloway, his voice reassuring. “There’s not much that they can do against us. This cliff is too high and too frangible for them to scale with ease, and despite their numbers they would be powerless against our amulets.”

He gestured again to the now helpless Wayt.

Several men, including the blacksmith, moved to lay hands on him while the remainder concentrated the strange power of the stones. He was acquiescent as they seized him and then I saw what was intended for him.

With a shocked cry I lunged forward to stop the enormity about to take place, but was restrained by Calloway’s bulk.

“Stop it, Calloway, stop it!” I shouted. “You must stop it! It’s blasphemy!”

“No,” he growled, his powerful arms holding me immobile. “It’s a cleansing.”

Several more villagers had staggered slowly into view, hampered by the weight of their burden. It was a solid wooden beam with a six-foot crosspiece. They laid it on the ground in front of the tomb and then one man with a pick and a spade began to hack a deep, narrow slot in the sod.

Wayt’s captors spreadeagled him upon the cross and his upper arms were securely lashed to the horizontal beam. The blacksmith knelt by the supine Wayt and with several savage blows from a small sledge drove six-inch nails through the creature’s wrists.

Gasping with the effort, the men manoeuvred the foot of the cross into the prepared slot, struggling to lift it clear of the ground. As it rose by several inches, long ropes were passed beneath the bar for them to haul upon. At last the cross was heaved into position, its base dropping with a thud into the hole. The smith hammered in wedges until satisfied that the cross could stand alone, firm and unwavering.

Throughout this ordeal, Wayt had remained still and mute, his stoicism unfathomable. The pounding of those long nails, the bone-jerking haul to the perpendicular, the sickening lurch as the crucifix settled, all of these must have caused him shrieking agony. But now, with obvious difficulty, he lifted his head and strained to look at the sky. His breath rasped audibly in his throat and chest as he managed to find voice. His shouted appeal was a dreadful parody of another crucifixion.

“Father!” he cried. “Dread Father from the stars and from the depths! Punish them! Punish them for what they do to your disciple!” The effort proved too much and with his breath a long, whistling exhalation, the grotesque head collapsed, the maw open and slack.

My head throbbed with a dull pain from my earlier accident and I felt a sombre cloak of depression settle about me. I lowered my face into hands which shook. It was extraordinary, but I could feel something, compassion of a kind, I suppose, for the monster on the cross. In that last cry there had been a spiritual suffering which transcended the physical. Wayt had become evil, perhaps; aberrant and frightening, certainly; but all of these changes were by human criteria. He remained a sentient being, capable of needs and longings, alien to us though the standards of his emotions might be.

“Put him out of his misery,” ordered Calloway. “Then finish it the way I told you.”

The blacksmith nodded, swung his hammer and cracked the man-thing’s skull. Wayt shuddered once and was still. I saw that there were more people coming down from the hill and onto the plateau. I wondered if the whole of Lower Bedhoe was somehow involved.

Most of the newcomers were bearing bundles of dead branches, gleaned from the woods, which they piled about the foot of the cross. Someone splashed liquid onto the kindling and I caught the strong smell of petrol. A rag was ignited and tossed onto the pyre which exploded into fiery life, filling the air with a furnace wind and the crackling sound of burning wood. Villagers hurried to fuel the conflagration and whitening flames reached higher and higher to conceal and consume the remains of Alaric Wayt.

There were women there, too, covering the comatose girl with blankets and carrying her from the scene.

I sighed and Calloway gripped my shoulders, shaking me gently. “It was a cleansing, Roderick,” he repeated softly. He took a hip-flask from his jacket and offered it to me. I sipped the brandy and then I took another, longer, swallow. It didn’t help much. I returned the flask to my friend.

“What happened?” I asked. “What caused this?”

It was Calloway’s turn to sigh. “Ken Porter’s story, and what we ourselves witnessed, made me suspect that Wayt was undergoing something like an Innsmouth change. I was sure that nothing would happen until tonight, I just wasn’t able to get back as soon as I had hoped. Al Azif instructs that a sacrifice must take place at each important phase of the moon. That must have been the fate of those three foreign students, last full moon, new moon and half moon. Tonight was the next full moon in the cycle.

“While I left you here to keep watch, I went to see a fellow who has had a lot to do with fighting the Ancient Ones and their acolytes. I knew that Titus had a supply of the star-stones and I begged their use for tonight. I also stopped off to make certain enquiries which gave me half-expected answers.

“There were four leading families in Innsmouth, all of them associating with the Deep Ones: the Marshes, Gilmans, Eliots and Waites, the last name being spelt in the common way. I told you all those months ago that some Innsmouth dwellers probably escaped the federal dragnet. There were quite a few children unaccounted for. He—” nodding at the burning cross from which there was now an abominable stench “—he was the offspring of a Waite. He was brought to this country, a babe in arms, by a distant cousin, a member of the British branch of the family. Wayt was legally adopted and his surname altered to an archaic spelling.

“We’ll never know whether it was the Romans or Britons or both that destroyed Vitellius Priscus. Whoever, I think they failed to put the body to the flames and an essence—Porter’s black shadow—was therefore able to survive in that sepulchre, waiting through long centuries for a new host.

“But the tradition of keeping outsiders away from this place survived from generation to generation. The reason may have been forgotten but the various landowners remained steadfast to the custom, despite all the turbulence of history, until Sir Peter died and the title passed to someone born and resident in a far land.

“I don’t know what would have happened had any person other than Alaric Wayt opened the tomb. Much the same, I expect, although I think that his antecedents made him uncommonly susceptible. It’s even possible that his ancestry was the reason for his determination to excavate the site—a racial memory. The tomb shadow must have triggered the instinct to make contact with his hideous kin, very likely in dreams, which is the way the Innsmouth dwellers did it. They goaded him to make the sacrifices necessary to speed his transformation and he researched the Al Azif for the essential rites. He chose the students who remained for two reasons: all were small and would minimise effort until his strength grew, and all were from lands where they were unlikely to be missed for a long time if at all. The rest you know.”

“How do we explain Wayt’s disappearance?” I asked.

“An accident,” said Calloway. “His tent will catch fire and will be so thoroughly incinerated as to leave little to investigate. Witnesses will testify to his growing eccentricities, his insistence on staying alone in his tent with only an oil-lamp and the fuel supplies. The local coroner is a Bedhoe man and a verdict of accidental death will be returned.”

“What about the girl?”

“She’s in a simple trance. Wayt’s first sacrifices were carried out the hard way but he soon discovered the secrets of hypnosis. I have enough knowledge to right matters. She’ll be told that she was found on the road, sleepwalking.”

I searched for other objections. “How do you know this won’t recur?” I said. “Others may be given permission to dig here. Some residue of the horror may remain to infect them.”

Calloway lit a cigarette. “I think not,” he answered. “I have been calling in some favours. I’m sure the land will be found to be contaminated with anthrax and the Ministry of Agriculture will seal the area off in perpetuity.”

The moon was high by now and the surface of the Channel was silvered to the horizon. It was clear save for the harlequin dappling of small waves.

“They’ve gone,” I said.

“For now,” said Calloway. “They’ll be back, sometime, somewhere. We haven’t won a war or even a battle here tonight. We’ve won a skirmish, a skirmish so insignificant as to be meaningless.”

I could not help feeling bitter as I glanced at the consuming flames behind us. “Then why was this necessary?”

“Stop thinking like a priest for a moment,” said Calloway. “If he hadn’t been stopped, how many innocents would have died to achieve his purpose? Agreed that he had gone a long way into his transfiguration, but he was nowhere near changed enough to take his place in the sea.”

Calloway tossed the stub of his cigarette over the cliff and I watched its glimmer trailing down to diminish in an effervescent cascade of sparks on the rocks below.

“You know,” he went on. “It’s my opinion that we will never win this hidden war. It has been said, time and again, that the Ancient Ones will return ‘when the stars are right’. Think about it, Roderick, when will the stars be right and from whose vantage point?”

He stared at the night sky. “The universe is infinite, and at every point in that infinity the pattern of stars will be different. And from every point in that infinity the patterns will appear to change every few millennia. Given the present limits of human mind and thought, the scales of distance and time are so vast as to be inconceivable, unacceptable even.

“In astronomical terms, however, those scales are nothing but a step, but an instant. From somewhere out there, the stars could be right for the Ancient Ones tomorrow; or the due time could be so remote as for mankind to have become extinct. I hope the latter. For all our sakes, I hope the latter.

“No, we’ll never conquer the Ancient Ones or their multitudinous servants. You see, they have time on their side.”

THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE

by BRIAN STABLEFORD

THE DIRECTIONS WHICH Ann had dictated over the phone allowed me to reach Innsmouth without too much difficulty; I doubt that I would have fared so well had I been forced to rely upon the map printed on the end-papers of her book or had I been forced to seek assistance along the way.

While descending from the precipitous ridge east of the town I was able to compare my own impressions of Innsmouth’s appearance with the account given by Ann in her opening chapter. When she spoke to me on the phone she had told me that the book’s description was “optimistic” and I could easily see why she had felt compelled to offer such a warning. Even the book had not dared to use the word “unspoiled,” but Ann had done her best to imply that Innsmouth was full of what we in England would call “old-world charm.” Old the buildings certainly were, but charming they were not. The present inhabitants—mostly “incomers” or “part-timers,” according to Ann—had apparently made what efforts they could to redeem the houses from dereliction and decay, but the renovated façades and the new paint only succeeded in making the village look garish as well as neglected.

It proved, mercifully, that one of the principal exceptions to this rule was the New Gilman House, where a room had been reserved for me. It was one of the few recent buildings in the village, dating back no further than the sixties. The lobby was tastefully decorated and furnished, and the desk-clerk was as attentive as one expects American desk-clerks to be.

“My name’s Stevenson,” I told him. “I believe Miss Eliot reserved a room for me.”

“Best in the house, sir,” he assured me. I was prepared to believe it— Ann owned the place. “You sound English, sir,” he added, as he handed me a reservation card. “Is that where you know the boss from?”

“That’s right,” I said, diffidently. “Could you tell Miss Eliot that I’m here, do you think?”

“Sure thing,” he replied. “You want me to help you with that bag?”

I shook my head, and made my own way up to my room. It was on the top floor, and it had what passed for a good view. Indeed, it would have been a very good view had it not been for the general dereliction of the waterfront houses, over whose roofs I had to look to see the ocean. Out towards the horizon I could see the white water where the breakers were tumbling over Devil Reef.

I was still looking out that way when Ann came in behind me. “David,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

I turned round a little awkwardly, and extended my hand to be shaken, feeling uncomfortably embarrassed.

“You don’t look a day older,” she said, hypocritically. It had been thirteen years since I last saw her.

“Well,” I said, “I looked middle-aged even in my teens. But you look wonderful. Being a capitalist obviously suits you. How much of the town do you own?”

“Only about three-quarters,” she said, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “Uncle Ned bought the land for peanuts back in the thirties, and now it’s worth—peanuts. All his grand ambitions to ‘put the place back on the map’ came to nothing. He got tenants for some of the properties he fixed up, but they’re mostly week-enders who live in the city and can’t afford authentic status symbols. We get a few hundred tourists through during the season—curiosity-seekers, fishermen, people wanting to get away from it all, but it’s hardly enough to keep the hotel going. That’s why I wrote the book—but I guess I still had too much of the dry historian in me and not enough of the sensational journalist. I should have made more of all those old stories, but I couldn’t get my conscience past the lack of hard evidence.”

“That’s what a university education does for you,” I said. Ann and I had met at university in Manchester—the real Manchester, not the place to which fate and coincidence had now brought me—when she was studying history and I was studying biochemistry. We were good friends—in the literal rather than the euphemistic sense, alas—but we hadn’t kept in touch afterwards, until she discovered by accident that I was in New Hampshire and had written to me, enclosing her book with news of her career as a woman of property. I had planned to come to see her even before I read the book, and found the excuse which made the prospect even more inviting.

As she watched me unpack, the expression in her grey eyes was quite inscrutable. Politeness aside, she really did look good— handsome rather than pretty, but clear of complexion and stately in manner.

“I suppose your coming over to the States is part of the infamous Brain Drain,” she said. “Was it the dollars, or the research facilities which lured you away?”

“Both,” I said. “Mostly the latter. Human geneticists aren’t worth that much, and I haven’t published enough to be regarded as a grand catch. I’m just a foot-soldier in the long campaign to map and understand the human genome.”

“It beats being chief custodian of Innsmouth and its history,” she said, so flatly as to leave no possibility of a polite contradiction.

I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “if I get a paper out of this, it will put Innsmouth on the scientific map, at least—though I doubt that the hotel will get much business out of it. I can’t imagine that there’ll be a legion of geneticists following in my trail.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m afraid it might not be so easy,” she said. “All that stuff in the book about the Innsmouth look is a bit out of date. Back in the twenties, when the population of the town was less than four hundred it may well have been exactly the kind of inbred community you’re looking for, but the post-war years brought in a couple of thousand outsiders, and despite the tendency of the old families to keep to themselves the majority married out. I’ve looked through the records, and most of the families that used to be important in the town are extinct—the Marshes, the Waites, the Gilmans. If it hadn’t been for the English branch, I guess the Eliots would have died out too. The Innsmouth look still exists, but it’s a thing of the past—you won’t see more than a trace of it in anyone under forty.”

“Age is immaterial,” I assured her.

“That’s not the only problem. Almost all of those who have the look are shy about it—or their relatives are. They tend to hide themselves away. It won’t be easy to get them to co-operate.”

“But you know who they are—you can introduce me.”

“I know who some of them are. But that doesn’t mean that I can help you much. I may be an Eliot, but to the old Innsmouthers I’m just another incomer, not to be trusted. There’s only one person who could effectively act as an intermediary for you, and it won’t be easy to persuade him to do it.”

“Is he the fisherman you mentioned over the phone—Gideon Sargent?”

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s one of the few lookers who doesn’t hide himself away, though he shows the signs more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen. He’s saner than most—got himself an education under the GI Bill after serving in the Pacific in ’45—but he’s not what you might call talkative. He won’t hide, but he doesn’t like being the visible archetype of the Innsmouth look—he resents tourists gawping at him as much as anyone would, and he always refuses to take them out to Devil Reef in his boat. He’s always very polite to me, but I really can’t say how he’ll react to you. He’s in his sixties now—never married.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I observed. I was unmarried; so was Ann.

“Maybe not,” she replied, with a slight laugh. “But I can’t help harbouring an unreasonable suspicion that the reason he never married is that he could never find a girl who looked fishy enough.”

***

I thought this a cruel remark, though Ann obviously hadn’t meant it to be. I thought it even crueller when I eventually saw Gideon Sargent, because I immediately jumped to the opposite conclusion: that no girl could possibly contemplate marrying him, because he looked too fishy by half.

The description which Ann had quoted in her book was accurate enough detail by detail—narrow head, flat nose, staring eyes, rough skin and baldness—but could not suffice to give an adequate impression of the eerie whole. The old man’s tanned face put me in mind of a wizened koi carp, though I could not tell at first—because his jacket collar was turned up—whether he had the gill-like markings on his neck which were the last and strangest of the stigmata of the Innsmouth folk.

Sargent was sitting on a canvas chair on the deck of his boat when we went to see him, patiently mending a fishing-net. He did not look up as we approached, but I had no doubt that he had seen us from afar and knew well enough that we were coming to see him.

“Hello, Gideon,” said Ann, when we were close enough. “This is Dr. David Stevenson, a friend of mine from England. He lives in Manchester now, teaching college.”

Still the old man didn’t look up. “Don’t do trips round the reef,” he said, laconically. “You know that, Miss Ann.”

“He’s not a tourist, Gideon,” she said. “He’s a scientist. He’d like to talk to you.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, still without altering his attitude. “’Cause I’m a freak, I suppose?”

“No,” said Ann, uncomfortably, “of course not...”

I held up my hand to stop her. “Yes, Mr. Sargent,” I said. “That is why, after a manner of speaking. I’m a geneticist, and I’m interested in people who are physically unusual. I’d like to explain that to you, if I may.”

Ann shook her head in annoyance, certain that I’d said the wrong thing, but the old man didn’t seem offended.

“When I were a young’un,” he commented, abstractedly, “there was a man offered Ma a hunnerd dollars for me. Wanned t’put me in a glass tank in some kinda sideshow. She said no. Blamed fool— hunnerd dollars was worth summin then.” His accent was very odd, and certainly not what I’d come to think of as a typical New England accent. Though he slurred common words he tended to take more trouble over longer ones, and I thought I could still perceive the lingering legacy of his education.

“Do you know what ‘genetics’ means, Mr. Sargent?” I asked. “I really would like to explain why it’s important that I talk to you.”

At last he looked up, and looked me in the eye. I was ready for it, and didn’t flinch from the disconcerting stare.

“I know what genes are, Doc,” he said, coolly. “I bin a little curious myself, y’know, to fin’ out how I got to be this way. You gonna tell me? Or is that what y’wanner figure out?”

“It’s what I want to figure out, Mr. Sargent,” I told him, breathing a slight sigh of relief. “Can I come aboard?”

“Nope,” he replied. “’Taint convenient. You at the hotel?”

“Yes I am.”

“See y’there t’night. Quarter of eight. You pay f’r the liquor.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Sargent. I appreciate it.”

“Don’ mention it,” he said. “An’ I still don’ do trips to the reef. Or pose f’r Jap cameras—you mind me, now, Miss Ann.”

“I mind you, Gideon,” she answered, as we turned away.

As soon as we were out of earshot, she said: “You’re honoured, David. He’s never come to the hotel before—and not because no one ever offered to buy him a drink before. He still remembers the old place, and he doesn’t like what Uncle Ned put up in its place any more than he likes all the colonists who moved in when the village was all-but-dead in the thirties.”

We were passing an area of the waterfront which looked like a post-war bomb-site—or one of those areas in the real Manchester where they bulldozed the old slums but still haven’t got round to building anything else instead.

“This is the part of the town that was torched, isn’t it?” I said.

“Sure is,” she replied. “Way back in ’28. Nobody really knows how it happened, though there are plenty of wild stories. Gang warfare can be counted out—there was no substantial bootlegging hereabouts. Arson for arson’s sake, probably. It’s mostly mine now—Uncle Ned wanted to rebuild but never could raise the finance. I’d sell the land to any developer who’d take it on, but I’m not hopeful about my chances of getting rid of it.”

“Did the navy really fire torpedoes into the trench beyond the reef?” I asked, remembering a story which she’d quoted in her book.

“Depth charges,” she said. “I took the trouble to look up the documents, hoping there’d be something sensational behind it, but it seems that they were just testing them. There’s very deep water out there—a crack in the continental shelf—and it was convenient for checking the pressure-triggers across the whole spectrum of settings. The navy didn’t bother to ask the locals, or to tell them what was going on; the information was still classified then, I guess. It’s not unnatural that the wacky stories about sea-monsters were able to flourish uncontradicted.”

“Pity,” I said, looking back at the crumbling jetties as we began to climb the shallow hill towards Washington Street. “I rather liked all that stuff about the Esoteric Order of Dagon conducting its hideous rites in the old Masonic Hall, and Obed Marsh’s covenant with the forces of watery evil.”

“The Esoteric Order of Dagon was real enough,” she said. “But it’s hard to find out what its rituals involved, or what its adherents actually believed, because it was careful not to produce or keep any records— not even sacred documents. It seems to have been one of a group of crazy quasi-gnostic cults which made a big thing about a book called the Necronomicon—they mostly died out at about the time the first fully-annotated translation was issued by the Miskatonic University Press. The whole point of being an esoteric sect is lost when your core text becomes exoteric, I guess.

“As for old Obed’s fabulous adventures in the South Seas, almost all the extant accounts can be traced back to tales that used to be told by the town character back in the twenties—an old lush named Zadok Allen. I can’t swear that every last detail originated in the dregs of a whiskey bottle, but I’d be willing to bet my inheritance that Captain Marsh’s career was a good deal less eventful than it seemed once Zadok had finished embroidering it.”

“But the Marshes really did run a gold refinery hereabouts? And at least some of the so-called Innsmouth jewellery is real?”

“Oh sure—the refinery was the last relic of the town’s industrial heyday, which petered out mid-19th century after a big epidemic. I’ve looked at the account-books, though, and it did hardly any business for thirty-five or forty years before it closed down. It’s gone now, of course. The few authentic surviving examples of the old Innsmouth jewellery are less beautiful and less exotic than rumour represents, but they’re interesting enough—and certainly not local in origin. There are a couple of shops in town where they make ‘genuine imitations’ for tourists and other interested parties—one manufacturer swears blind that the originals were made by pre-Columbian Indians, the other that they were found by Old Obed during his travels. Take your pick.”

I nodded, sagely, as if to say that it was what I’d suspected all along.

“What are you looking for, David?” she asked, suddenly. “You don’t really think that there’s anything in Zadok Allen’s fantasies, do you? You surely can’t seriously entertain the hypothesis that the old Innsmouthers were some kind of weird crossbreed with an alien race!”

I laughed. “No,” I reassured her, with complete sincerity. “I don’t believe that—nor do I believe that they’re some kind of throwback to our phantom aquatic ancestors. You’d better sit in tonight when I explain the facts of life to old Gideon; the reality is likely to be far more prosaic than that, alas.”

“Why alas?” she asked.

“Because what I’m looking for will only generate a paper. If the folklore quoted in your book were even half-true, it would be worth a Nobel Prize.”

***

Gideon Sargent presented himself at the hotel right on time. He was dressed in what I presumed was his Sunday best, but the ensemble included a roll-neck sweater which kept the sides of his neck concealed. There were half-a-dozen people in the bar, and Gideon drew a couple of curious glances from the out-of-towners, but he was only a little self-conscious. He was used to carrying his stigmata.

He drank neat bourbon, but he drank slowly, like a man who had no intention of getting loaded. I asked a few questions to find out exactly how much he did know about genes, and it turned out that he really was familiar with the basics. I felt confident that I could give him a reasonably full explanation of my project.

“We’ve already begun the business of mapping the human genome,” I told him. “The job will require the collective efforts of thousands of people in more than a hundred research centres, and even then it will take fifteen or twenty years, but we have the tools to do it. While we’re doing it, we hope to get closer to the answers to certain basic problems.

“One of these problems is that we don’t know how genes collaborate to produce a particular physical form. We know how they code for the protein building blocks, but we don’t know much about the biochemical blueprint which instructs a growing embryo how to develop into a man instead of a whale or an ostrich. Now this may seem odd, but one of the best ways of figuring out how things work is to study examples which have gone wrong, to see what’s missing or distorted. By doing that, you can build up a picture of what’s necessary in order for the job to be done properly. For that reason, geneticists are very interested in human mutations—I’m particularly interested in those which cause physical malformation.

“Unfortunately, physical mutants usually fall into a few well-defined categories, mostly associated with radical and fairly obvious disruptions of whole chromosomes. There are very few viable human variations which operate on a larger scale than changing the colour of the skin, or the epicanthic fold which makes Oriental eyes distinctive. That’s not entirely surprising, because those which have arisen in the past have mostly been eliminated from the gene-pool by natural selection, or diluted out of existence by hybridisation. It’s one of the ironies of our trade that while molecular genetics was becoming sophisticated enough to make them significant, the highly inbred communities of the world were disappearing. All we have in America is a handful of religious communities whose accumulations of recessive genes aren’t for the most part very interesting. As soon as I read Ann’s book I realised that Innsmouth must have been a real genetic treasure-trove back in the twenties. I hope that there still might be time to recover some vital information.”

Gideon didn’t reply immediately, and for a moment or two I thought he hadn’t understood. But then he said: “Not many people got the look any more. Some don’ show it ’til they’re older, but I don’ see much sign of it comin’ thru in anyone I see. Ain’t no Marshes or Waites any more, and the only Eliots”—he paused to look at Ann— “are distant cousins o’ the ones that settled here in the old days.”

“But there are a few others, besides yourself, who show some of the signs, aren’t there?” Ann put in.

“A few,” Gideon admitted.

“And they’d co-operate with Dr. Stevenson—if you asked them to.”

“Mebbe,” he said. He seemed moodily thoughtful, as though something in the conversation had disturbed him. “But it’s too late to do us any good, ain’t it, Doc?”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant. He meant that whatever understanding I might glean from my researches would only be of theoretical value. I wouldn’t be able to help the Innsmouthers look normal.

It was, in any case, extremely unlikely that my work would lead to anything which could qualify as a “cure” for those afflicted with the Innsmouth stigmata, but really, there was no longer any need for that.

The Innsmouthers had taken care of the problem themselves. I remembered what I’d said about gross malformations being eliminated from the gene-pool by natural selection, and realised that I’d used the word “natural” in a rather euphemistic way—as many people do nowadays. The selective pressure would work both ways: the incomers who’d recolonised Innsmouth after the war would have been just as reluctant to marry people who had the Innsmouth look as people who had the Innsmouth look would have been to pass it on to their children.

Gideon Sargent was certainly not the only looker who’d never married, and I was sure that he wouldn’t have, even if there’d been a girl who looked like he did.

“I’m sorry, Gideon,” I said. “It’s a cruel irony that your ancestors had to suffer the burden of ignorance and superstition because genetics didn’t exist, and that now genetics does exist, there’s not much left for you to gain from a specific analysis of your condition. But let’s not underestimate the value of understanding, Gideon. It was because your forefathers lacked a true understanding that they felt compelled to invent the Esoteric Order of Dagon, to fill the vacuum of their ignorance and to maintain the pretence that there was something to be proud of in Innsmouth’s plight. And that’s why stories like the ones Zadok Allen used to tell gained such currency—because they provided a kind of excuse for it all. I’m truly sorry that I’m too late to serve your purposes, Gideon—I only hope that I’m not too late to serve mine. Will you help me?”

He looked at me with those big saucery eyes, so uncannily frightening in their innocence.

“Is there anythin’ y’ can do, Doc?” he asked. “Not about the bones, nor the eyes—I know we’re stuck wi’ them. But the dreams, Doc—can y’do anythin’ about the dreams?”

I looked sideways at Ann, uncertainly. There had been something in her book about dreams, I recalled, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. It hadn’t seemed to be part of the problem, as seen from a biochemist’s point of view. Obviously Gideon saw things differently; to him they were the very heart of the problem, and it was because of them that he’d consented to hear me out.

“Everybody has dreams, Gideon,” said Ann. “They don’t mean anything.”

He turned round to stare at her, in that same appalling fashion. “Do you have dreams, Miss Ann?” he asked, with seemingly tender concern.

Ann didn’t answer, so I stepped into the breach again. “Tell me about the dreams, Gideon,” I said. “I don’t really know how they fit in.”

He looked back at me, obviously surprised that I didn’t know everything. After all, I was a doctor, wasn’t I? I was the gene-wizard who knew what people were made of.

“All of us who got the look are dreamers,” he said, in a painstakingly didactic fashion. “’Taint the bones an’ the eyes as kills us in the end— ’tis the dreams which call us out to the reef an’ bid us dive into the pit. Not many’s as strong as me, Doc—I know I got the look as bad as any, an’ had it all the time from bein’ a kid, but us Sargents was allus less superstitious than the likes o’ the Marshes, even if Obed’s kin did have all the money ’fore it passed to Ned Eliot. My granpa ran the first motor-bus out o’ here, tryin’ to keep us connected to Arkham after the branch-line from Rowley was abandoned. It’s the ones that change goes mad, Doc—they’re the ones as starts believin’.”

“Believing what, Gideon?” I asked, quietly.

“Believin’ as the dreams is true... believin’ in Dagon an’ Cthulhu an’ Pth’thya-l’yi... believin’ as how they c’n breathe through their gills’n dive all the way to the bottom of the ocean to Y’ha-nthlei... believin’ in the Deep Ones. That’s what happens to the people wi’ the look, Doc. Natural selection—ain’t that what y’called it?”

I licked my lips. “Everyone with the look has these dreams?” I queried. If it was true, I realised, it might make the Innsmouth enigma more interesting. Physical malformation was one thing, but specific associated psychotropic effects was quite another. I was tempted to explain to Gideon that one of the other great unsolved questions about the way the genes worked was how they affected mind and behaviour via the chemistry of the brain, but that would have meant taking the discussion out into deeper water than he could be expected to handle. There was, of course, a simpler and more probable explanation for the dreams, but in confrontation with Gideon’s quiet intensity I couldn’t help but wonder whether there might be something more profound here.

“The dreams alius go wi’ the look,” he insisted. “I had ’em all my life. Real horrors, sometimes—unearthly. Can’t describe ’em, but take my word for it, Doc, you don’ ever want to meet ’em. I’m way past carin’ about the look, Doc, but if you could do summin ’bout the dreams... I’ll dig up the others f’r ye. Every last one.”

It would mean widening the tests, I knew, but I could see that it might be worth it. If the dreams were significant at the biochemical level, I could have something really hot. Not a Nobel Prize, but a real reputation-maker. The implications of discovering a whole new class of hallucinogenics were so awesome that I had difficulty pulling myself back down to earth. First catch your hare, I reminded myself, carefully.

“I can’t make any promises, Gideon,” I told him, trying hard to give the impression that I was being overly modest. “It’s not easy to locate abnormal DNA, let alone map it and figure out exactly what it’s doing. And I have to say that I have my reservations about the possibility of finding a simple answer which will lend itself to some kind of straightforward treatment. But I’ll do the best I can to find an explanation of the dreams, and once we have an explanation, we’ll be able to see what might be done to banish them. If you can get these people to agree to my taking blood and tissue-samples, I’ll certainly do what I can.”

“I c’n do it,” he promised me. Then he stood up, obviously having said what he came to say, and heard what he’d hoped to hear. I put out my hand to shake his, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he said: “Walk me to the shore, will y’Doc?”

I was almost as surprised by this as Ann was, but I agreed. As we went out I told her that I’d be back in half-an-hour.

At first, we walked down the hill in silence. I began to wonder whether he really had anything to say to me, as I’d assumed, or whether it was just some curious whim which had inspired him to ask me to go with him. But when we were within sight of the seafront he suddenly said: “You known Miss Ann a long time?”

“Sixteen years,” I told him, figuring that it wasn’t worth wasting time on an explanation of the fact that we hadn’t communicated at all for twelve-and-a-half out of the last thirteen.

“You marry her,” he said, as though it were the most natural instruction in the world for one stranger to give another. “Take her to Manchester—or back to England, even better. Innsm’th’s a bad place f’r them as owns it, even if they ain’t got the look. Don’ leave it to yer kids... will it to the state or summin. I know you think I’m crazy, Doc, you bein’ an educated man ’n’ all, but I know Innsm’th—I got it in th’ bones, th’ blood an’ th’ dreams. ’Taint worth it. Take her away, Doc. Please.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but he’d timed his speech to preclude that possibility. We were now in one of the narrow waterfront streets which had survived the great fire, and he was already pausing before one of the shabby hovels, opening the door.

“Can’t invite y’in,” he said, tersely. ’Taint convenient. G’night, Doc.”

Before I could say a single word, the door closed in my face.

***

Gideon was as good as his word. He knew where to find the remaining Innsmouthers who had the look, and he knew how to bully or cajole them into seeing me. A few he persuaded to come to the hotel; the rest I was permitted to visit in their homes—where some of them had been virtual prisoners for thirty years and more.

It took me a week to gather up my first set of samples and take them back to Manchester. Two weeks after that I returned with more equipment, and took a further set of tissue specimens, some from the people I’d already seen, others—for the sake of comparison—from their unafflicted kinfolk. I threw myself into the project with great enthusiasm, despite that I still had a good deal of routine work to do, both as a research worker and in connection with my teaching. I made what passes in my business for rapid headway, but it wasn’t rapid enough for the people of Innsmouth—not that there was ever any real possibility of making good my promise to find a way to banish their evil dreams.

Three months after our first meeting Gideon Sargent died in a freak storm which blew up unexpectedly while he was fishing. His boat was smashed up on Devil Reef, and what was left of it was later recovered—including Gideon’s body. The inquest confirmed that he had died of a broken neck, and that the rest of his many injuries had been inflicted after death while the boat was tossed about on and around the reef.

Gideon was the first of my sample to die, but he wasn’t the last. As the year crept on I lost four more, all of whom died in their beds of very ordinary causes—not entirely surprisingly, given that two were in their eighties and the others in their seventies.

There were, of course, a few unpleasant whispers which said (arguing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as rumours often do) that my taking the tissue samples had somehow weakened or over-excited the people who died, but Gideon had done some sterling work in persuading the victims of the look that it was in their interests to cooperate with me, and none of the others shut me out.

I had no one left whose appearance was as remarkable as Gideon’s. Most of the survivors in my experimental sample showed only partial stigmata of an underdeveloped kind—but they all reported suffering from the dreams now and again, and they all found the dreams sufficiently horrific to want to be rid of them if they could. They kept asking me about the possibility of a cure but I could only evade the question, as I always had.

While I was travelling back and forth from Innsmouth on a regular basis I naturally saw a lot of Ann, and was happy to do so. We were both too shy to be overly intrusive in questioning one another, but as time went by I began to understand how lonely and isolated she felt in Innsmouth, and how rosy her memories of university in England now seemed. I saw why she had taken the trouble to write to me when she learned that I had joined the faculty at Manchester, and in time I came to believe that she wanted to put our relationship on a more formal and permanent basis.

But when I eventually plucked up enough courage to ask her to marry me, she turned me down.

She must have known how hurt I was, and what a blow to my fragile pride I had suffered, because she tried to let me down very gently—but it didn’t help much.

“I’m really very sorry, David,” she told me, “but I can’t do it. In a way, I’d like to, very much—I feel so lonely sometimes. But I can’t leave Innsmouth now. I can’t even go to Manchester, let alone back to England, and I know you won’t stay in the States forever.”

“That’s just an excuse,” I contended, in martyred fashion. “I know you own a great deal of real estate here, but you admit that it’s mostly worthless, and you could still collect the rents—the world is full of absentee landlords.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s... something I can’t explain.”

“It’s because you’re an Eliot, isn’t it?” I asked, resentfully. “You feel that you can’t marry for the same reasons that Gideon Sargent felt that he couldn’t. You don’t have a trace of the Innsmouth look about you, but you have the dreams, don’t you? You nearly admitted as much to Gideon, that night when he came to the hotel.”

“Yes,” she said, faintly. “I have the dreams. But I’m not like those poor old mad people who locked themselves away until you came. I know that you won’t find a cure for them, even if you can find an explanation. I understand well enough what can come of your research and what can’t.”

“I’m not sure that you do,” I told her. “In fact, I’m not sure that you understand your own condition. Given that you don’t have a trace of the look, and given that you’re not directly descended from any of the Eliots of Innsmouth, what makes you think that your nightmares are anything more than just that: nightmares? As you said to Gideon when he raised the issue, everyone has dreams. Even I have dreams.” In the circumstances, I nearly said had, but that would have been too obvious a whine.

“You’re a biochemist,” she said. “You think that the physical malformation is the real issue, and that the dreams are peripheral. Innsmouthers don’t see it that way—for them, the dreams are the most important thing, and they’ve always seen the look as an effect rather than a cause. I’m an Innsmouther too.”

“But you’re an educated woman! You may be a historian, but you know enough science to know what the Innsmouth look really is. It’s a genetic disorder.”

“I know that the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Obed Marsh’s adventures in the South Seas are just a myth,” she agreed. “They’re stories concocted, as you said to Gideon, to explain the dreams and excuse an inexplicable affliction caused by defective genes. But it might as easily have been the Eliots who imported those genes as anyone else, and they might easily have been in the family for many generations—England used to have its inbred populations too, you know. I know that you only took tissue-samples from me for what you called purposes of comparison, but I’ve been expecting all along that you would come to me and tell me that you’d found the rogue gene responsible for the Innsmouth look, and that I have it too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, plaintively. “It really doesn’t matter. We could still get married.”

“It matters to me,” she said. “And we can’t.”

***

I suppose that incident with Ann should have redoubled my determination to trace the DNA-complex which was responsible for the Innsmouth syndrome, in order that I could prove to her that she wasn’t afflicted, and that her dreams were only dreams. In fact, it didn’t; I was hurt by her rejection, and depressed. I continued to work as hard as I ever had, but I found it increasingly difficult to go to Innsmouth, to stay in the hotel where she lived, and to walk through the streets which she owned.

I began to look for someone else to soothe my emotional bruises, while Ann and I drifted steadily apart. We were no longer good friends in any real sense, though we kept up some kind of a pretence whenever we met.

In the meantime, the members of my experimental sample continued to die. I lost three more in the second year, and it became even more obvious that whatever I discovered wasn’t going to be of any practical import to the people whose DNA I was looking at. In a way, it didn’t matter that much to the programme—the DNA which Gideon and all the rest had provided still existed, carefully frozen and stored away. The project was still healthy, still making headway.

In the third year, I finally found what I was looking for: an inversion on the seventh chromosome, which trapped seven genes, including three oddballs. In homozygotes like Gideon the genes paired up and were expressed in the normal way; in heterozygotes like most of my sample—including all of the survivors—the chromosomes could only pair up if one of them became looped around, stopping several of the genes from functioning. I didn’t know what all of the genes did, or how—but my biochemical analyses had given me a partial answer.

I drove to Innsmouth the next day, in order to tell Ann the news. Although our relationship had soured and fallen apart, I still owed her as much of an explanation as I could now give.

“Do you know what Haeckel’s law is?” I asked her, while we walked beside the Manuxet, past the place where the Marsh refinery had once been located.

“Sure,” she said. “I read up on the whole thing, you know, after we got involved. Haeckel’s law says that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that the embryo, in developing, goes through a series of stages which preserve a kind of memory of the evolutionary history of an organism. It’s been discredited, except as a very loose metaphor. I always thought that the Innsmouth look might turn out to have something to do with the fact that the human embryo goes through a stage where it develops gills.”

“Only the ghosts of gills,” I told her. “You see, the same embryonic structures which produce gills in fish produce different structures in other organisms; it’s called homology. Conventional thinking, muddied by the fact that we don’t really understand the business of blueprinting for physical structure, supposes that when natural selection works to alter a structure into its homologue—as when the fins of certain fish were modified by degrees into the legs of amphibians, for instance, or the forelimbs of certain lizards became the wings of birds—the blueprint genes for the new structure replace the blueprint genes for the old. But that’s not the only way it could happen. It may be that the new genes arise at different loci from the old ones, and that the old ones are simply switched off. Because they aren’t expressed any more in mature organisms they’re no longer subject to eliminative natural selection, so they aren’t lost, and though they may be corrupted by the accumulation of random mutations—which similarly aren’t subject to elimination by natural selection—they may remain within the bodies of descendant species for millions of years. If so, they may sometimes be expressed if there’s a genetic accident of some kind which prevents their being switched off in a particular organism.”

She thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: “What you’re saying is that human beings—and, for that matter, all mammals, reptiles and amphibians—may be carrying around some of the blueprint genes for making fish. These are normally dormant—untroublesome passengers in the body—but under certain circumstances, the switching mechanism fails and they begin to make the body they’re in fishy.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And that’s what I shall propose as the cause of the Innsmouth syndrome. Sometimes, as with Gideon, it can happen very early in life, even before birth. In other instances it’s delayed until maturity, perhaps because the incipient mutations are suppressed by the immune system, until the time when ageing sets in and the system begins to weaken.”

I had to wait a little while for her next question, though I knew what it would be.

“Where do the dreams fit in?” she asked.

“They don’t,” I told her. “Not into the biology. I never really thought they did. They’re a psychological thing. There’s no psychotropic protein involved here. What we’re talking about is a slight failure of the switching mechanism which determines physical structure. Ann, the nightmares come from the same place as the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Zadok Allen’s fantasies—they’re a response to fear and anxiety and shame. They’re infectious in exactly the same way that rumours are infectious—people hear them, and reproduce them. People who have the look know that the dreams come with it, and knowing it is sufficient to make sure that they do. That’s why they can’t describe them properly. Even people who don’t have the look, but fear that they might develop it, or feel that for some eccentric reason they ought to have it, can give themselves nightmares.”

She read the criticism in my words, which said that I had always been right and she had always been wrong, and that she had had no good cause for rejecting my proposal. “You’re saying that my dreams are purely imaginary?” she said, resentfully. People always are resentful about such things, even when the news is good, and despite the fact that it isn’t their fault at all.

“You don’t have the inversion, Ann. That’s quite certain now that I’ve found the genes and checked out all the sample traces. You’re not even heterozygous. There’s no possibility of your ever developing the look, and there’s no reason at all why you have to avoid getting married.”

She looked me in the eye, as disconcertingly as Gideon Sargent ever had, though her eyes were perfectly normal, and as grey as the sea.

“You’ve never seen a shoggoth,” she said, in a tone profound with despair. “I have—even though I don’t have the words to describe it.”

She didn’t ask me whether I was renewing my proposal—maybe because she already knew the answer, or maybe because she hadn’t changed her own mind at all. We walked on for a bit, beside that dull and sluggish river, looking at the derelict landscape. It was like the set for some schlocky horror movie.

“Ann,” I said, eventually, “you do believe me, don’t you? There really isn’t a psychotropic element in the Innsmouth syndrome.”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”

“Because,” I went on, “I don’t like to see you wasting your life away in a place like this. I don’t like to think of you, lonely in self-imposed exile, like those poor lookers who shut themselves away because they couldn’t face the world—or who were locked up by mothers and fathers or brothers and sisters or sons and daughters who couldn’t understand what was wrong, and whose heads were filled with stories of Obed Marsh’s dealings with the Devil and the mysteries of Dagon.

“That’s the real nightmare, don’t you see—not the horrid dreams and the daft rites conducted in the old Masonic Hall, but all the lives which have been ruined by superstition and terror and shame. Don’t be part of that nightmare, Ann; whatever you do, don’t give in to that. Gideon Sargent didn’t give in—and he told me once, though I didn’t quite understand at the time, that it was up to me to make sure that you wouldn’t, either.”

“But they got him in the end, didn’t they?” she said. “The Deep Ones got him in the end.”

“He was killed in an accident at sea,” I told her, sternly. “You know that. Please don’t melodramatise, when you know you don’t believe it. You must understand, Ann—the real horrors aren’t in your dreams, they’re in what you might let your dreams do to you.”

“I know,” she said, softly. “I do understand.”

I understood too, after a fashion. Her original letter to me had been a cry for help, though neither of us knew it at the time—but in the end, she’d been unable to accept the help which was offered, or trust the scientific interpretation which had been found. At the cognitive level, she understood—but the dreams, self-inflicted or not, were simply too powerful to be dismissed by knowledge.

And that, I thought, was yet another real horror: that the truth, even when discovered and revealed, might not be enough to save us from our vilest superstitions.

***

I didn’t have any occasion to go back to Innsmouth for some time, and several months slipped past before I had a reason sufficient to make me phone. The desk-clerk at the hotel was surprised that I hadn’t heard—as if what was known to Innsmouthers ought automatically to be known to everyone else on Earth.

Ann was dead.

She had drowned in the deep water off Devil Reef. Her body had never been recovered.

I didn’t get any sort of prize for the Innsmouth project, and despite its interesting theoretical implications it wasn’t quite the reputation-maker I’d hoped it would be. As things turned out, it was only worth a paper after all.

THE HOMECOMING

by NICHOLAS ROYLE

BELGRADE’S DANUBE RAILWAY station was cold and dark, its staff unhelpful. Daniela had to suppress a desire to turn back and return to her little room off Yuri Gagarin Boulevard. But she had taken the decision and there was no going back on it.

Belgrade had been comfortable—the standard of living far higher than anywhere in Romania—but never quite home. Her grasp of Serbo-Croat just about allowed her to order a beer and buy a bus ticket. It was with the help of other Romanian exiles that she had been able to find a room and furnish it with a large sofa and an old TV.

When reports of the Timisoara massacre first leaked out of Romania she stayed indoors round the clock waiting for further news. She was watching bleary-eyed from lack of sleep when the crowds massed in central Bucharest ostensibly to demonstrate support for President Ceausescu. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The Berlin Wall had crumbled and the Czech communists had been ousted only weeks before. And the Romanians were going to let the Ceausescu regime get away with the slaying of thousands of people in Timisoara, not to mention the subjugation of the entire country for the last twenty-four years.

The people in the square waved their banners and listened while Ceausescu droned from his balcony. Then the unthinkable appeared to be happening. Daniela tensed on her sofa, hardly daring to breathe in case she missed anything. Parts of the crowd had thrown down their banners and begun to berate their president. More joined in and Ceausescu became confused. He believed the people loved him because his sycophants assured him of it daily. He began a chopping, sweeping motion with his arm as if he wanted to brush the troublemakers aside or erase them like an error committed in haste.

That night, troops from the ranks of the Securitate—the hated secret police—reacted with force. Dozens died but the spirit of the people was not broken. At eleven the next morning state television reported that the defence minister was a traitor and had committed suicide. The crowd sensed it as a turning point and attacked the central committee building.

Daniela was crouching on the floor, her mouth alternately dry and filling up with the juices of fear and excitement. Her whole body vibrated like a tightly coiled spring.

Ceausescu was still in the building when the revolutionaries gained access and began to rampage through it. The TV pictures showed him taking off in a helicopter at the same time as the revolutionaries swarmed on to the roof.

Daniela spat at the screen, pleaded with God to let the helicopter crash.

She watched the feared Securitate fight their desperate counterrevolution and was still watching on Christmas Day when the Ceausescus were shown lying dead on the ground after their summary trial and execution by firing squad.

She sat so close her nose touched the screen. There he was, the Conducator, the President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Grand Leader of the Peoples of Romania, the despot who had bled the country dry with his insane obsession to pay off all foreign debt, so that his people queued for bread at 5:00 a.m. and considered chicken’s feet a feast. The paranoid tyrant, who had his toilet seat scrubbed with alcohol before and after use and sent anyone making a joke about him to jail for two years, lay in the dirt, his collar tightly fastened, his grey old face puffy, his eyes closed forever.

She clasped the television set to her and rolled on to her back.

Two months later in Belgrade-Danube railway station she was thinking of reneging on her decision to go back home to Romania. No, she couldn’t. She climbed on board the train. The guard wanted her to pay in US dollars for a sleeper. She offered him ten. He shook his head.

“How much?” she asked him.

“Thirty,” he muttered sourly.

It was Daniela’s turn to shake her head. “No way,” she snorted and stalked off to find a seat. The problem with Romanian Railways was that you acquired a seat reservation at the same time as you bought your ticket. But only if your journey started inside Romania. She couldn’t reserve a seat in Belgrade. When they crossed into Romania people would board the train at Timisoara with reservations for unmarked seats and Daniela could find herself with nowhere to sit. But she wasn’t paying $30 for a sleeper. It was a disgrace and hardly in the spirit of the revolution.

The train rolled through northern Serbia, through the province of Vojvodina, and Daniela grew bored of the unchanging scenery. She felt tense and nervous about returning to Romania.

Several weeks had passed since the revolution. The counterrevolution had been put down inside a week, after which time Securitate agents were smoked out of the ruins and either killed or sent for trial. So she had nothing to fear. On the contrary: she was excited to be going back. But excitement always smelled a little like fear.

The motion of the train lulled her to sleep.

She dreamed pictures from the revolution. They were things she’d seen on television but now without the protection of the screen. Tanks rumbled through the streets of Bucharest belching exhaust fumes and shelling buildings indiscriminately. Automatic fire scored deep scratches in the plaster finishes of rundown apartment buildings. The muzzle of a gun appeared at a window, followed by a face and immediately a burst of fire directed at the street. A soldier fired back from behind the tank. He hit his target and the man fell back into the room while his gun toppled to the street. The tank’s gun turret swivelled thirty degrees and shelled the building. Masonry and glass shattered like toys and flames blew out of several blackened windows. The gun twisted farther round and shelled the next building, and the next.

It was a kind of purging process, she realised dimly. An exorcism by mortar and fire of the city’s evil presence.

She woke up worrying about the tunnels. Apparently a secret network of tunnels existed underneath Bucharest accessible only to the Securitate. But with terrified agents scampering like rabbits for cover, the hiding places could not have remained inviolable.

She fell asleep again. Border guards woke her. They impinged on her exhausted senses as uniformed automata. Sleep took her once more. At Timisoara there was a mighty scuffling and shambling of feet and bodies as denizens of the persecuted town crammed on to the train. “Reservat! Reservat” they protested in a flat, toneless whine, but she snored louder and they died away.

Bucharest was still several hours distant. Daniela slid in and out of sleep as if it were a bath full of tepid, scummy water. She confused glimpses of the forlorn compartment and its huddled occupants with snatches of dreams. At one point she jumped when she thought she saw Ceausescu and his wicked wife slumped in the opposite seats, their faces puffed up and pockmarked by sooty bullet wounds, their jaws collapsed.

At some indeterminate stage in her dreams, Daniela became aware of natural light. Early-morning light the colour of dishwater was smeared across the window, streaked by thicker cloud as if applied unevenly with a cloth. Two of her fellow passengers were already awake: a stubble-faced old man stuffed into a shabby trilby, and a sallow boy no more than eighteen or nineteen. Their complexions reflected the mood of the morning and none of the revolutionary zeal she had expected.

Once she had woken up there was no going back to sleep. For one thing the dreams were too disturbing. She peered through the grimy glass hoping to see some feature of the presumed landscape loom out of the fog. But nothing emerged. The longer she stared the more she became dissociated from reality. Maybe Romania had vanished, replaced by this almost sea-like fog. She half expected to glimpse the flick of a fish’s tail or to meet the mournful gaze of some fantastic creature of the deep.

She must have drifted back to sleep because all of a sudden she was looking out of the window at the outskirts of Bucharest. The fog had lifted but still hung above the rooftops, below the sky; more a mist now than a fog, but one polluted by soot and grit.

The train passed over a level crossing and Daniela caught sight of figures loitering at various points down a dusty street. One of the Dacias parked in a long row beneath the skeletal trees was a charred wreck. She supposed there would be the odd one or two scattered about.

But the train rattled on deeper into the city. She’d only been away a year and in that time things had changed. In the last decade most of the city’s old buildings, churches first and foremost, had come under threat of demolition. It was no idle threat. The train passed a section of waste ground peppered with weeds that Daniela realised with a pang had been the site of one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches.

With a jolt from the locomotive as it braked round the last curve, the line of dirty green carriages visible ahead through the window see-sawed into the Gara de Nord.

***

The station was the same as she remembered it. As ugly as sin itself. Eager for impressions she walked out into the streets. They smelled the same as they had before, of spoilt and rotten fruit. Since fresh fruit had rarely been freely available in Bucharest, Daniela had always believed the drains to be responsible. It depressed her that the revolution had not left its own scent on the city. She looked for signs of the fighting she’d watched on the television news. There were potholes in the middle of the road, but there always had been. The people she passed looked much as they had done before: unhealthy, paranoid, defeated. There was none of the joy of liberation in their eyes, no spark of defiance. The burden appeared not to have been lifted from them.

She wandered bewildered away from the railway station and its satellite cheap hotels and prostitutes. One street crossed another and turned into a new one. But they all looked the same. She passed a lot of broken and boarded-up windows. Doors were tightly locked and where shutters protected windows still further, they were snapped shut.

When she stopped walking she fancied she could hear movement behind the sightless windows and obstructed doorways. But the susurrant nature of the noise she heard put her more in mind, once more, of the city’s drains.

On the corner was a dingy grocery store. She peered inside but could make nothing out of the huge shadows and shafts of dusty reflected light. Behind her the street whispered and she felt unaccountably anxious. She looked around. Three young children stood over a mound of fur on the opposite corner. Daniela looked closer and saw that the animal was a dog. Fixed in a rictus, its jaw was caked with blood and its legs stuck out stiffly. The children stared at Daniela with wide but uncurious eyes. One of them kicked the dog’s belly with a bare foot. The dead animal scraped against the gritty pavement. Daniela hurried into the grocery store.

She became instantly lost in a maze of shelves. They held nothing but dust so thick it looked like stacks of dead mice. She turned into a dead end and frightened a spider. As big as a bunch of keys it clattered on to the floor and scuttled under the bottom shelf.

Sweat began to run in the dust on her forehead and her breathing became tight. She whirled around looking for the exit. An aisle looked promising, but when she turned the comrner she found herself by the counter. She would have fled but a man materialised from shadows which hung like curtains and twitched.

“What do you want?” he asked her in a friendly voice. She wondered if it might be a trap.

“The shelves are empty,” she whispered hoarsely.

He pointed to a selection of pickles and preserves in jars on a shelf behind the counter. He explained that stocks were low. His manner seemed not unfriendly and Daniela felt that if she couldn’t trust him she couldn’t trust anyone in this godforsaken city.

“I’ve been away,” she said. “I saw everything on television. And now it looks the same as before.”

The man shrugged his shoulders beneath his grubby shopcoat.

“Why are people still afraid?” she demanded crossly. “The Securitate are finished, aren’t they?”

At this the man’s brows knitted and he raised a yellowed finger to his lips. They parted to release a sound which reminded her of the boarded-up windows. She noticed that the man’s finger also seemed to be pointing at the wall above his head. When she squinted through the gloom she recognised beneath trails of dusty cobwebs a photograph frame.

Daniela turned and ran. She couldn’t deny that the frame had enclosed the shiny button eyes and hamster cheeks of the executed dictator. Why hadn’t the photograph been destroyed? She collided with a shelf and coughed and spluttered when the dust flew in her face like a cloud of flies.

She was relieved to reach the door but distressed to see the three children across the street knelt down around the dog, plunging their large bony hands into its split carcass.

Weakened by her experience in the shop, Daniela felt unable to intrude on the depravity. She turned her back and at the next junction headed down the street that looked least threatening. There were still shuttered windows and patches of broken glass in the road but she began to feel reassured by certain signs. There were more shops and queues of people emerging from their doors. At an intersection she turned down a major boulevard towards the city centre.

Here the scars of civil war were plentiful. Burned-out and overturned cars, entire tenement blocks destroyed by fire, craters in the road. Only the Intercontinental Hotel appeared untouched, where foreign journalists and newsmen would no doubt have stayed. Daniela drifted into a couple of stores. The photographs of Ceausescu had been taken down and left bleached rectangles on the wall. There was little to buy apart from the ubiquitous jars of pickled fruit and slabs of sweaty cheese.

She wandered further into the commercial district. Window-shoppers thronged the narrow lanes. Daniela couldn’t help comparing the shops and goods to those available in Belgrade. In truth, there was no comparison.

She turned her attention to the shoppers themselves. They were, for the most part, dowdy and introspective. Before the revolution, one in four citizens were reckoned to be an informer. Consequently no one spoke, making Bucharest an aural city of shuffled footsteps. Even now few words were exchanged, as if the facility had deserted the people.

Unless...

Unless there were still good reason to be fearful of speaking.

Daniela’s stomach flipped over. Her heart raced. The Securitate’s unofficial uniform had consisted of tracksuits and leather jackets.

All around her in the street were men dressed this way. She had got used to seeing expensive leisure wear in Belgrade and thinking nothing of those inside it. But in Bucharest these clothes meant something.

A dark, swarthy man in jeans and a leather jacket carrying a shopping bag filled with jars and potatoes approached Daniela. Her legs went elastic. He looked at her eyes as he passed and she felt her soul bristle.

Across the street a middle-aged man wearing a tracksuit stood looking in a shoe-shop window. A woman in a long black coat came out of the shop and took his arm.

Two young men shared a joke as they sauntered down the middle of the street. At whose expense? she wondered as she eyed their leather jackets.

She couldn’t remember if there had been so many tracksuits and jackets before. But maybe they didn’t mean anything. They would be easier to get hold of after the revolution. And anyway, the Securitate had been eliminated. The National Salvation Front had seen to that.

Her head was in a whirl because she didn’t know what to believe. She recalled the thought she’d had upon waking up in the train, about the tunnels. There were tunnels under the street where she stood, and secret passages in the Central Committee Building and the People’s Palace. Was it possible that the Securitate had burrowed so deep beneath the city and into the nation’s psyche, that they had become ingrained, indelible, immortal?

The Deep Ones.

Thrown off balance by panic, she began to run up the street, skidding to a halt outside shop doorways to look in. People stopped and stared. Men in leather jackets, women wearing fur hats, young men in tracksuits. At one doorway she grabbed hold of the doorposts and hurled herself into the shop’s interior. It was a clothing store. To right and left hung cheap blouses and poor-quality jeans. Customers and staff stared open-mouthed as she dashed between the racks, brushing against the blouses and sending metal hangers spinning. She ground to a halt in a room at the back of the store furthest from the street. The carpet was reedy and worn and the floorboards sagged beneath her feet. The carpet smelled too, but the reek of leather was stronger. Around the room on rails suspended from the ceiling hung leather jackets. There were hundreds of them. In the middle of the room rails carrying tracksuits had been pushed together to squeeze in as many as possible. She caught a glimpse of a figure slipping out of the room by way of a narrow doorway between two thick curtains of leather and buckles and zip fasteners.

Her instinct was to run and grab the man from behind and force him to look at her. But she was immobilised by fear. The abundance of expensive gear should have relieved her anxiety—the inference being that this stuff was now widely available—but the effect was the reverse. She felt scrutinised. As if the jackets and cotton trousers had already been filled by the ever-watchful sharp-eared agents of the Securitate. She remembered mentioning Ceausescu’s name in a factory canteen and the entire row of tables falling silent. One out of four of her fellow workers was bending an ear for a whispered criticism, the other three too scared to air their views. A week later she was rapped across the knuckles and slapped by a supervisor for failing to meet her quota, where normally a verbal chastisement would have been expected. She never had proof that the two incidents were related. But in a country where terror and paranoia reigned, proof was irrelevant.

She didn’t need to worry any more, she told herself. Ceausescu and Elena were dead. She’d seen their bodies on television. They were the Old Ones now. They were history.

The garments surrounding her were just harmless threads inhabited by nothing more than twisted pieces of wire.

They were like shrouds enclosing ghosts.

Or swaddling clothes wrapped around newborn terrors.

The paranoia was a cancer. You thought you’d got rid of it. Then it sprang up again.

Daniela shivered and walked towards the doorway. She brushed against a jacket and the hanger jangled like the spider in the grocery store. The leather touched her cheek and she jumped away: it felt cold as a dead fish. Taking affright, she hared out of the shop.

The street was no haven. Her fellow citizens thronged the narrow streets and lanes and none could be trusted. She snaked through the queues of shoppers and escaped the commercial district for the wide boulevards where she could breathe easier. The people here were as few as the denuded trees under which they walked. Awkward adolescents in ill-fitting polyester suits stood guard in particular doorways as if the revolution had been a dream or a film made for television.

At the next intersection two police motorbikes roared into the boulevard, resounding against the canyon walls formed by massive apartment blocks. Following the police bikes came two smart black Dacias. Another escort was two seconds behind. The cavalcade gained speed, moving down the wide thoroughfare away from Daniela.

She felt an icy hand grip her insides and squeeze. Why did the country’s new leaders ride around with a police escort? The National Salvation Front was the revolution. They didn’t need protecting from the people. They were the people. She resumed her stride. Maybe they feared the Securitate like she did. With the Ceausescus dead the former secret police had nothing to lose, so might be even more dangerous than before.

The tunnels, the tunnels...

She imagined she could hear them susurrating in the dark labyrinth, feeling their way beneath the city, behind the façade, like grubs in a rotten apple. It smelled as bad.

She had noticed that passersby had slunk into the shadows of the buildings when the black Dacias came into view. Now they came out again like slow-witted, sightless creatures from beneath stones.

***

She stepped into the road and crossed to the other side. Cutting through an area of light industry she aimed for the district where she had lived, before deciding she’d had enough and hiking through the mountains south of Resita, where the frontier was traversable in the early hours of the morning. She patted her pocket and felt reassured by the bulge the keys made.

The devastation got worse as she veered south-east. Entire blocks were destroyed or the lower floors were knocked out and the upper storeys abandoned. Where people clung to their past existences, shreds of curtains were tousled by the breeze through jagged holes in the glass. A face peered down into the street. Its complexion hinted at a lifetime spent hundreds of fathoms beneath daylight. Daniela watched to see if the eyes would follow her as she passed by the building. They did not. She felt queerly light-headed and wondered if the detached aspect of the face was more than just an impression. It looked bloodless enough to have been severed, possibly weeks before.

Disappointment awaited her when she reached the building that had been hers. The upper floors had been demolished and the debris had trickled down to fill the apartments nearer the ground. Daniela had lived within four cracked, peeling walls on the third floor. She could still make out her room. It resembled a ruined tooth in which caries had festered for years.

Tears stung her eyes. She tried to knuckle them back. Instead of wanton destruction, it was a sacrifice in the name of the people. The Old Ones were dead, the Deep Ones bereft of leadership. All she had lost was a place to sleep. She took the keys from her pocket and flung them into the rubble at the base of the building. Wiping at her tears with a sleeve, she walked away, wondering glumly where to seek shelter.

At the back of her mind since returning to the city had been her brother and his apartment in the south-west quarter. It was fifteen years at least since they had seen each other and she had never visited him at home, but she had the address.

She headed back towards the city centre, wrinkling her nose at the ripe stench that blew up side roads from abandoned buildings and stagnant sewers. Among pedestrians once more she watched them slyly, but too many gibbous eyes met hers. They were observing her. She diverted her gaze to the pavement, where it existed, and the pitted road where it did not. She wondered if her clothes, acquired in Belgrade, aroused suspicion. But they were dull compared to items she could have bought.

She saw a bus and thought about crossing town in one to save time: soon it would be getting dark. It stopped at a red light and she frowned at its broken windows and dented panels. A skin of grime had been pulled tight over the whole bus. Disembodied heads bobbed behind the thick aquarium glass as it lunged away from the intersection.

Daniela shuddered at the thought of stepping into such a bus and the concertina doors flapping shut behind her like sentient accomplices of the dubious folk already on board. She would feel like a defendant confronted by her jurors and judges. Guilty until proven innocent. Sentenced and executed right there in court. Which, after all, was what the people had done to the Ceausescus. So now the Securitate would take their revenge. Suddenly everyone in the city was in the service of the Securitate and she was their quarry.

Another bus had pulled up at the side of the road and its doors folded back. Daniela turned and fled into the next side street. She didn’t look back, but crossed the street and turned out of it as soon as she could. At the next corner she looked behind. There was nothing to see. Just the same random patterns of broken glass and boarded-up windows, machine-gun scratches and shell craters. She kept walking in what she hoped was the right direction, but had lost heart. She glanced up cross-streets, having developed the irrational fear that the bus might be following her on a parallel track.

Before long she was completely lost and her teeth had begun to chatter with the cold. Dusk obscured the nature of everything within her field of vision. Street lighting, part of the Old Ones’ legacy, was the merest glimmer. Like a torch swung in a shuttered house, it only served to make it seem darker than it was. Daniela strained to read the name of the hundredth identical street she’d turned into. She was about to give up when the shadows smudging the letters cleared for a moment and she read: Gheorghe Street.

That was the street. It had to be.

Excitedly she dug a folded piece of paper out of her coat pocket and scrutinised it. The street name was the same.

With a lighter step she moved down the street trying to read the numbers. When she reached the right building she stepped back and gazed up at it. Nothing distinguished the building from its neighbours. The sky above the roofs was rapidly losing its colour. She ran up three flights of stairs, dodging lumps of masonry and piles of household rubbish. The door to her brother’s flat was ajar. She knocked, expecting no reply, and gently pushed the door open. It was too dark to make anything out. She flicked a light switch and nothing happened.

Lurking on the threshold she became afraid, unable to enter or leave the apartment. There was no sound from the rest of the building, nothing stirring in the street. She couldn’t even hear the sluicing of the drains. The flat smelled bad. Still she couldn’t see anything, though her eyes had had time to adjust.

Having come so far, across borders real and imaginary, she couldn’t just walk away. Something—maybe the same determination that helped her escape from the country in the first place—carried her into the apartment. She felt her way along the wall beyond the light switch. The plaster was clammy beneath her right hand. She moved slowly forward, her left arm extended in front of her. Suddenly the wall disappeared. She had reached an open doorway and peered through. Illumination from outside squeezed through cracks between boards nailed across the window frame. Three or four faint rods of light divined the room’s secrets: a split mattress, stuffing and springs extruded, a smashed table, and an unresolvable jigsaw of broken glass.

A soft clunk came from somewhere behind her.

She froze and caught her breath. It was probably a bird trapped under the roof, or a rat. Or a man. A Securitate agent in hiding. A desperate man with nothing to lose.

She strained her ears for any kind of noise. The streets were as quiet as death. Then, as light as feathers falling on snow, she heard a pattering of tiny clawed feet.

Rats. She didn’t mind rats. She preferred them to men.

***

There was no point staying at the apartment. Her brother was obviously long gone and without light she could neither search for clues to his whereabouts, nor clear a space to sleep. Gingerly she picked her way out of the apartment and down to street level. There was no one about. She crossed the street and walked to its end. There she turned right and headed in what she hoped was the direction of the city centre.

She was strangely comforted by the slushing of the drains when she noticed the noise had returned. There were passersby too. Some turned ostentatiously to watch her as she passed; others tended more to the shadows away from the piss-yellow streetlamps. A hotel sign flickered and buzzed. She asked for a single room. The assistant manager gave her forms to fill out and, after a brief, mumbled phone conversation, a key. She trudged up the stairs to the second floor and peered at the numbers on the doors, looking for 25. The lighting was meagre: every other bulb had been removed and those remaining leached no more than twenty watts of soupy ochre. She twisted the key and closed the door behind her. Only when she was confident no one had followed to listen outside the door did she begin to undress. She dropped her sweater on a plain wooden chair by the window. The moon was almost full. She beheld her image in a cracked mirror as she pulled off her shirt and unfastened her underwear. The moonlight fell on her pale body like a caul, making the number branded on her shoulder stand out: 20363.

She climbed into bed and hugged the blankets about her. She was trying to deny the regret she felt at coming back. Though the window was closed she could hear shuffling footsteps in the street. Within half-an-hour they had completely died away. She was drowsy and her limbs ached.

A sound outside her door made her jump and tingle with fright. She had heard footsteps. She listened but heard nothing. Maybe she’d dreamed it. Then, quite distinctly, she heard footsteps coming along the corridor, slowing down as they approached her room. Another set of footsteps came from the opposite direction and followed the same pattern. Voices muttered unintelligibly and were raised slightly as if in disagreement.

Suddenly the door rattled in its frame. The handle twisted and turned. A weight was pressed against it from outside and Daniela heard wood splinter.

They were getting in and she couldn’t move: the blankets had pinioned her to the bed. She thrashed and grunted.

A long craaaack from the door.

She screamed.

And woke up, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear.

There was no sound in or outside her room. The hotel was as quiet as a morgue. She curled up into a ball underneath the bedclothes and tried to relax.

She was walking through the city again. Along nondescript streets battle-scarred from the revolution. With no aim in mind she just kept on walking. One street blended into another. She turned corners without being aware of changing direction. Her sense of smell, however, was active. The city stank of the drains which gurgled beneath the streets. And the smell was getting stronger. She walked on past darkened windows and barricaded doorways. The stench wafted up the street towards her in waves. At the end of the street she turned left into a wide boulevard as empty as it would have been in the early hours of the morning even though the sky was afternoon-bright. The boulevard broadened before her. A soft, persistent thrum could be felt beneath her feet. The old tenements had disappeared and been replaced by new buildings, huge and bland. She passed over a manhole cover and heard the rushing of something beneath. It smelled like sewage but sounded much thicker, almost corporeal. She wondered what vermin might be crawling around beneath the city.

She left the apartment blocks behind. In the middle of the boulevard now were fountains constructed out of plaster and false marble, and tall streetlamps twisted like grappling irons. These distractions melted away and she was suddenly engulfed by the stench of the drains. Like the sewage outfall pipes at Constanta, the smell reminded her also of the sea.

The boulevard had become a vast expanse stretching ahead of her to some kind of reef raised above it.

Then, in a flash, she saw the water. The entire boulevard between where she stood and the mysterious reef was covered with water. She stepped back in alarm for it was filthy water.

There was a haze above it which may have been steam or putrescence rising from the water. It was like a vast sea clogged with human issue. The stench became so bad she retched dryly. The reef shimmered in the haze and appeared about to reform its questionable geometry. Then it was solid again and peculiarly ugly and threatening, as before. If it was formed of rock, the surface was scored with holes and tunnels, like a maze. She wondered what foul creatures inhabited such a terrible place. The thought struck her that it might be a huge encrustation of waste fashioned by the tides into a rocky reef.

She noticed her legs were carrying her forward into the polluted shallows and screamed and screamed and screamed... until she woke up.

She sat up, her head throbbing from the horror of the dream and the din of her terror. Her screams echoed like ghosts on a tape recorder. Otherwise the hotel was quiet. No one came running to restrain the mad woman. Between two rags of curtains the morning fell into the room like a slab of unwashed concrete.

In her mind she kept replaying the stark image of the reef sticking out of the sea of vile waste. She imagined a myriad dirty parasites crawling all over their host.

The reef resembled nothing she’d seen in Bucharest, yet the stench of the drains and the random patterns of the street were an inextricable part of her new experience of the city.

She hauled her body out of bed, sensing it must be quite late in the morning. The tap in the bathroom at the end of the hall dribbled cold brown water, which only reminded her of her dream.

Downstairs the assistant manager watched her walk across the foyer, place her key on the desk counter and head for the exit. As she opened the door to the street she heard him pick up the phone and mutter a few words in a thick accent. She felt like an outsider, unable even to understand the language.

***

By day her brother’s apartment building looked unremarkable. The gouts of trash littering the stairway offered no clues. She pushed open his door and stepped inside.

The apartment had been devastated, not by artillery, it seemed, for the walls and floors were intact, but by routine wreckers, obviously agents of the Securitate running amuck as they launched the counterrevolution; on the wall they had daubed in black paint the single word TRAITOR. Every item of furniture had been smashed. Even the three pieces of the bathroom suite had received sledgehammer blows. The bath had been holed, the toilet and washbasin had large chunks knocked out of them. She twisted one of the taps. Pipes groaned and water the same colour as her dream splashed her hand. She withdrew it instantly and wiped it on her trousers, shuddering. But she noticed, as it continued to run, that the brown disappeared and the water was soon clear. She switched off the tap, slightly encouraged.

Investigating the remaining rooms, she was surprised by the size of her brother’s apartment. She wondered how he had come to live so well.

The headboard of his bed had been reduced to splinters but the base was still functional. She fetched the split mattress from the front room and placed it good-side-up on the bed. Maybe, if she could find sheets and a blanket, she wouldn’t have to go back to the hotel.

She worked for two hours or more, piling rubbish in the corridor outside the apartment and salvaging what sticks offurniture she could. She tried removing some of the filth from the kitchen wall with tap water and rags from under the cleft sink. Driven by a determination to save what she could of her old life in the city, tenuous though she believed the link with her brother to be, she rubbed and scraped at the walls. Soon exhaustion calmed her efforts and she realised no progress would be made without proper materials. There was also the graffiti in the front room which she was determined to remove. Her brother was a patriot. She had no doubt he was out demonstrating at the moment his building was overrun. Though they had never been close, she felt a rush of protective love for him. Let him be safe, she prayed, as her mind conjured images of him lying crushed under masonry, dumped in a mass grave with another man’s foot in his face, or crumpled at the base of a deeply-scratched wall riddled with bullets, like the dead tyrant.

She left the flat to look for cleaning materials and to get some fresh air. She tried not to feel intimidated by the streets. She thought her personal efforts to eradicate the Securitate should strengthen her. Taking a new route which she hoped would lead to shops—there were none near the hotel—she jumped once when a car backfired in a neighbouring street.

The gloomy overcast of the morning had thinned only slightly. Nevertheless, when she turned into the boulevard it seemed brighter. For the middle of the afternoon the pavements were eerily quiet. The buildings were more modern and while they were less grim in their aspect, they were certainly more banal. She passed a row of elaborate fountains and stopped dead in her tracks.

Her heart, after missing a beat, thumped like a triphammer. Her mouth dried up and sweat sprang out on her hairline.

In front of her was the filthy sea of her dream and, shimmering, the reef.

She felt faint. Fear pooled in her mouth. Her skin prickled.

The mirage vanished, to be replaced by the New People’s Palace, separated from her by an expanse of false marble. She recognised the Palace, Ceausescu’s last folly, from television pictures filmed during its construction. This whole end of the city had been systematically razed and redeveloped as New Bucharest. She remembered now, the new buildings she’d passed were apartments for Securitate agents. It had been claimed that secret tunnels linked both the Palace and the new apartments to the existing tunnels under the city.

She looked at the Palace again. And screamed. It had changed back into the reef. The foul stench made her retch. She spewed bile into the sea lapping at her feet and scampered back from it.

But there was only false marble beneath her feet, discoloured by her involuntary disgust. The Palace, with its massive frontage, crenellated windows and deep-set archways bore a striking resemblance to the reef, as if she’d unknowingly modelled the dreamed edifice on this gleaming monstrosity.

She tore herself away to go in search of disinfectant and cloths. She settled instead for a bucket of thin white paint and a thick brush. As she set to work on the kitchen walls she was troubled by thoughts of the Palace and its inversion, the reef. She worried about the new apartment buildings and most of all the drains; the tunnels...

If Hell were to revisit the Earth its denizens would come crawling up through the tunnels.

She dipped the brush and drew a broad swathe across the wall. Cover-up, she thought anxiously. But what she was doing felt more honest than that. A diseased branch had been severed and she was painting the stump to protect it. Maybe her brother would come back and be grateful for her efforts. For now, though, she was concerned on a practical level with making the apartment habitable. Though she could go back to Belgrade whenever she liked, she felt tied to Bucharest. She had come home. The only family she had in the world was here. Somewhere. She dipped the brush and stroked the wall. Dipped and stroked.

In the front room she obliterated the insult, traitor. But when she stood back the word was still legible, so she slapped on several more layers. She stretched into corners and crouched down to the floor. Suddenly she stopped brushing. Something had caught her eye; a slanting graffito near the bottom of the wall. She rubbed away a smudge of dirt that had been obscuring it and read, Daniela. 20363. Her heart jumped and she wasn’t sure which emotion had kicked it. Love for her almost unknown brother, or fright at seeing her identity starkly represented on the wall? Had he scribbled it distracted by fear and excitement as the revolution gripped the city? Maybe he feared for her safety. Or was it, as it appeared, some kind of accusation or condemnation? Maybe the filth who had insulted her brother had intended to come after her next, not knowing she had fled the country a year before. But why would they write her name and number on the wall? And how would they even know of the number branded on her left shoulder?

It had to be her brother, desperate to help, unable to contact her. He would have seen the number when they were tiny children in Orphanage Number Six. Before they got separated. How he had committed the number to memory when so young was a mystery to her. But clearly he had. Tears stung her eyes as she wondered what their parents might have been like. They must have suffered and died so young. She had never known their names, nor seen their likeness, yet had always carried a dull ache for them which occasionally flared up, like a recurrent ulcer.

The terrible weight of self-pity now descended on her. No parents throughout her youth, no affection from the institutions that had raised her; and now no brother to share her grief. She left the brush in the paint and slunk into the bedroom where she curled up tightly on the cold, damp mattress.

***

The Deep Ones. The Old Ones.

The tunnels, the tunnels...

She couldn’t clear her mind of anxiety before sleep stole from the darkest shadows of the room to claim her.

The reef stood proud of the stinking sea. The air shimmered but the reef stood firm as rock.

Her eye was hurting. She poked a finger and rubbed it, but the irritation didn’t go away. She blinked furiously in an attempt to wash away the irritant. It failed to work. She noticed glints of light on the reef and wondered what on earth could have produced them. Maybe, if she had been right about the origin of the reef, it was infested with flies and the winter sun was catching in their wings.

She rubbed her eye again. There was a speck in it, something tiny and black. The sun flashed on another set of wings, dazzling her.

Still half-asleep, she rubbed her eyes. They felt sore, as if they had been bathed in salt water. Something bright shone into them. She pressed her fingers into them again, feeling them yield horribly, and rubbed hard.

Then she realised where the light was coming from and, shielding her eyes, opened them. A narrow shaft of sunlight had sneaked in through the back window and fell across Daniela’s face. She rolled on to her side away from the window. Her head was full of the reef, the flies crawling over it, and the sea of filth, but the sun warmed the back of her neck pleasantly and the horrific pictures lost some of their impact.

She reflected on the preceding day’s whitewashing and wondered just what she hoped to achieve in Bucharest. Although it didn’t feel like it, the city had changed irrevocably. The tyrants were dead— she’d seen their bullet-riddled bodies on television—and the country was free of their grip for the first time in twenty-four years. The sun moved from her neck over her head and struck the wall, revealing a patch of damp fungus. She had to carry on, she realised. The city was her home. Belgrade had just been a stop-over. The sun crept towards the floor, picking out loose splinters from the floorboards. She thought briefly about her long-dead parents. The sun prised open a gap between two uneven floorboards and caught in something shiny trapped beneath the floor. Daniela watched curiously. As the sun fell a little deeper into the hole in the floor it glittered for a second then struck square and reflected into her face.

She uncurled her body and crawled on to the floor. Pulling one floorboard up to allow her hand entry, she reached in and grasped a plastic wallet. She eased it out through the gap and laid it on the floor.

Daniela’s heart thudded. Her head buzzed with questions. She felt almost as if she were holding her lost brother’s hand and he began speaking to her.

In the plastic folder were two photographs, a map of Bucharest with lines traced in ballpoint along particular streets and linking each other, and two letters addressed to her brother and signed Daniela.

She assumed her brother had formed some kind of an attachment to a woman who happened to bear her name. Until she began to read the first letter. Then it became clear that the letter purported to be from her, thanking him for writing. She was well and living in Constanta, the letter said. Employed in a fabrics factory, she earned sufficient money to keep her comfortable and was a member of the local Party.

The second letter added that she remembered her childhood with great fondness but was now so happy in Constanta that she didn’t intend to visit Bucharest.

Obviously her brother had been taken in by the story and had asked to see her. They had put him off. She hadn’t been to Constanta since her adolescence, when she was briefly transferred to an orphanage in the Black Sea port. The postmarks on the envelopes, however, dated them to the very recent past.

The letters upset her. The map she could only guess at. But the photographs. Where one might have expected to find treasured snapshots of beloved parents, Daniela found official-issue portraits of the executed dictator and his wife, both in blooming health.

As she stared at the tyrant’s ever-youthful grin and his wife’s peaceful, oval face, her stomach slowly tied itself into a knot.

Reluctantly her mind began to work, recalling the graffito, TRAITOR, from the front room, and completing simple equations of logic. She shouldn’t have assumed that the word had been written by agents of the Securitate.

***

She walked through familiar streets and felt that at every window, even those boarded up, someone was watching her.

She had now remembered what the TV reporters had said at the time of the revolution. It had been revealed that many Romanian orphans were placed in special institutions where they were taught to honour and obey their country’s leaders from the earliest possible age: as soon as they could recognise a simple photograph. They grew to love Nicolae and Elena as surrogate parents and their transformation into Ceausescus crack personal bodyguard—“the blackshirts”—was merely the next step.

The last street turned into the boulevard and the new apartment buildings shone.

They became the most loyal and ruthless of all Securitate factions. So the TV reporters had claimed. And she knew better now than to doubt their revelations—TRAITOR. The family photographs of his adoptive parents. Her name and orphan’s number scribbled on the wall.

The Palace gleamed beyond the fountains, sunlight glinting off the hundreds of windows. Her eye hurt. A speck intruded on her vision. She blinked, but kept walking, her head becoming gassy.

On television in Belgrade she had seen still video images of the Ceausescus lying bullet-riddled at the base of the wall.

She heard a soft throbbing noise.

The tunnels, the tunnels...

After the trial, the Ceausescus had been led outside by guards, and followed by the ad hoc team of observers and judges who had presided. The man with the television camera was at the back and still in the corridor when the shots rang out. Thus, he could only film the bodies, not the execution.

Or: a bit of connivance and make-up and the whole thing was a hoax.

The speck increased in size and the throb became a buzz in the ear. The Palace shimmered. The tunnels were quiet.

By the time the speck had grown into a helicopter and Daniela had worked out who was coming home, she had already begun to run across the dried-up sea of filth to the gleaming reef. As they climbed out of the machine on to the roof of the People’s Palace, haggard and dishevelled but alive, Daniela reached the ground floor and started beating a tattoo on the first door she came to. Attracted and repelled, terrified and awed in equal measure, she demanded at the top of her voice to be let in. The lord was back in his house and life, and death, could begin again.

MOTHER HYDRA

DEEPNET

by DAVID LANGFORD

IT WAS DURING the winter of 1990 that I pieced together ten years’ hints, and almost wished I had not probed so deep. A shocking discovery about the world can be equally dismaying as a revelation of oneself. Perhaps committing these rough notes to disk will help clear my thoughts and even save me from the next step which seems so burningly inevitable.

My daughter...

The secret I think I know is centred on that small American port which I have never visited, although my late wife Janine once had an aunt there, or a cousin. (Too many years have slipped past for me to remember her every casual aside, though I very much wish I could.) All the same, the name is familiar enough in the industry, even though many software users never consciously note it. The title screen of every version of the Deepword word processor flashes up, just for a subliminal instant amid its wavy graphics, a copyright credit to Deepnet Communications, Inc. of Innsmouth, MA.

I am using version 6.01 now. For all my new-found misgivings, I am used to its smooth, tranquil operation. We claim the industry is fast-moving and “at the cutting edge,” but secretly most of my programming colleagues are creatures of tradition and ritual. Learn different keystrokes in order to make use of a far better program and save much precious time? There is no time for that.

Now I regret not taking time to listen to Janine when she talked about once visiting her small-town relative. Her image wavers in the seas of memory, somehow edited from liveliness to the stiff features of my one surviving picture (she always photographed badly). Her words... she made a humorous thing of it, but I was far away, thinking in program code. A derelict coastal town amid salt marshes, its few inhabitants straight out of Cold Comfort Farm, no doubt inbred for gnarled generations: “Arrr,” she quoted, “I mind you do be a furriner in they durned high heels of Babylon, heh heh... Something like that.” If she had lived, it might have ceased to be a joke.

The publicity brochure prattles on about how empty houses filled when prosperity and the software industry came to Innsmouth in the early days of the small-computer boom. New freeways threaded the marsh. Through the ’70s and ’80s Deepnet grew into an amorphous multi-national whose tentacles extend everywhere. Those yokels and genetic casualties now only survive in the traditional humour of our trade newspapers; or so we all thought.

I pause here. Sara is telling me, in the thick, laboured voice I have learned to understand, that she wants to play a game on my back-up computer. With her tenth birthday almost in sight, she will have to have her own machine soon. Janine wanted more children, but Sara is all I have. I love her very much.

Nevertheless I wish she reminded me even remotely of Janine, who was beautiful.

When the secret history of these times is properly written, I suspect that Janine should have a footnote of her own as one of the earliest recorded victims. Now and only now we are beginning to be told that pregnant women should beware of electromagnetic radiation, and in particular should stay well clear of computer VDUs. Beneath the world’s rippling surface there is always some unsuspected horror, lurking as did thalidomide.

In those days of innocence, when the equipment was slower, cruder and doubtless lacking any screen against electromagnetic leakage, Janine and I were not well off. Her income from technical authorship was too important to us, and she stuck to the keyboard until almost the very end of her pregnancy. Worse, she was just a little short-sighted (which gave her grey eyes a fine faraway look), and liked to work up close to the VDU.

The software she used through those final months was Deepword 1.6.

I prefer not to compute just how many hours of that time we really shared. When I’d logged up my own overtime, Janine and I would all too often sit with vision blurred and mouths silenced by the sheer weight of fatigue, as though far underwater.

Of course I said I should be with her for the birth; as usual she read my real feelings and told me not to be a stupid bloody martyr. Even when too enormous to turn over in bed, Janine was kind-hearted and full of humour. The business took a very long time: for me, eleven hours in a grey waiting-room redolent with stale coffee and disinfectant, her last eleven hours. I had never seen a professionally comforting nurse sound so grim as the young one who let it slip that there was some question as to whether even the baby should be kept on life-support.

Before too many more years, I suppose, our tragedy will be seen to fit into the classical pattern of excessive ’em field exposure during pregnancy, with its supposed pathogenic effects on tissue and especially young tissue. Miscarriage, for example, or infant leukaemia, or foetal abnormalities.

I was not shown Sara for some time. (I was not shown Janine at all.) Perhaps her soft bones had been twisted into some insupportable shape by the difficult birth, and later she relaxed as babies do into normality, or mostly so. No one explained to me the stitches on either side of her throat. I wish that first nurse had not looked so sick.

I will admit that Sara is excessively plain.

***

Watching her work with clumsy fingers at her Undersea Quest game reminds me that I have, in a way, visited the transatlantic home of Deepnet. The demonstration disk for their SHOGGOTH high-resolution graphics design system is one long computerised special effect, a tour of the Innsmouth streets as though you were floating effortlessly along them.

Dominated by the vast squat blocks of the Deepnet complex, it appears as a place of strange contrasts. The stylised images of buildings feature one or two old-fashioned gambrel roofs, and a variety of antique brick and stone houses stand out quaintly from the sea of new development. To show the versatility of the 3-D software, several fanciful touches have been added. One of the monolithic factory structures is, like an Escher print, re-entrant and geometrically impossible; and I am fairly sure that the physical Innsmouth does not include a 250-foot pyramid in its central square, least of all one which slowly but inarguably rotates.

As with all software from these makers, there is something oddly addictive about the SHOGGOTH presentation. Perhaps it is a matter of light and shadow. Instead of whizzing you crudely through the simulated streets in video-game fashion, the ingenious programming team chose to unveil their creation at a lazy pace which, aided by a greenish wavering in the image, gives the subtle illusion of motion underwater.

“Rapture of the deep” was always Janine’s phrase for when I lost myself in the depths of the computer terminal. It was a joke, but one which went sour on me when I looked back and thought of how little time we’d had together, how much of it I’d spent hacking out program code, enraptured.

Items notably not included in the SHOGGOTH demonstration are the jokey legends about Deepnet which surface from time to time in the trade papers. It was Computer Weekly which tried to make an amusing paragraph of the story that from their main development facility there runs a forty-five-inch cable of multichannel fibre-optic linkages which enters the nearby Manuxet estuary, heading seaward towards Devil Reef, and never again emerges. The rival paper Computing had a running joke about inbred local workers, bulgy-eyed from endless hours at the VDU, who toil in the depths of the complex and likewise fail to emerge, or not at any rate during daylight.

I reserve my judgement on this gossip. Things very nearly as unlikely are said about DEC and IBM, or any clannish company.

All the same, there is a proverb about straws in the wind...

***

My suspicions weigh very heavily on me, like the pressure of deep water.

But am I suffering from insight or from insanity? Patterns which connect up too many things can be suspect (and here I remember that VDU radiation has also been claimed to induce brain tumours or suicidal depression). I freely admit that I do not possess anything like statistically reliable evidence. If I had more friends, I might be able to offer more examples than those of Janine, and of Jo Pennick, Helen Weir, and certain unknowns at a school near my Berkshire home.

I have spoken of Janine. The others came later.

We contract programmers lead a nomadic life, drifting from company to company, isolated from the permanent staff who resent our skills and high fees. Sometimes we exchange shop-talk in bars (we mostly drink too much). And so I came to hear...

Mrs. Pennick was a heavy user of Deepword 2.2, in the same condition and for much the same reasons as Janine. She died of complications soon after giving birth to her Peter. With Ms. Weir it was the Deepcalc 1.14 spreadsheet, a daughter called Rose, and unexplained suicide a month or so later. The unknowns remain unknown and I have no real right to guess at their software heritage. But a dreadful conviction washes over me whenever I see (as so frequently I do) these young children of the VDU age, who presumably have parents or a parent somewhere, and who strongly resemble the unrelated Sara and Peter and Rose. Very strongly indeed.

The polite word, I am told, is “exophthalmic.”

I only advance a hypothesis. I dare not commit myself to admitting belief. Even the ’em research is still very far from being conclusive. But suppose, just suppose... That little seaport in Massachusetts has long had an odd reputation, it seems. The term “in-breeding” was often used of its staring natives. Could this conceivably have been a result of deliberate policy?

Deepnet, says a typical publicity flyer which comes to hand. Time for your business to move out from the shallows. Take your computer projections below the surface, with software that goes a little deeper. Software from by the sea...

Taking a hint from the eerie underwater imagery of so many Deepnet products (even their word processor’s title screen is decorated with stylised waves), I find “in-breeding” shifting in my mind’s eye to “breeding,” and again to “breeding back,” and I remember that all life arose in the sea. I also remember, unwillingly, the stitches that closed what might conceivably have been slits to left and right of the hours-old Sara’s throat.

Very cautiously I allow myself to admit that the ’em radiation pattern of a computer display must depend in part on the program driving that display; and to acknowledge that research into this radiation and its biological impact goes back thirty years; and to wonder whether, for twelve years or more, software from a certain source might not intentionally have had certain effects on pregnant users. Are the children of Innsmouth growing up all around us?

Deepnet. Great new applications from the old, established market leader. Software for the new generation. Talk to us on Internet at innsmouth@deepnet.com.

One last niggling point concerns my daughter’s Undersea Quest, a best-selling computer game which has won many awards for excitement untainted with violence. Players learn to progress not by attacking but by co-operating with the huge, friendly and vaguely frog-like creatures which populate the game world. It is all very ecologically sound. A full virtual-reality version is promised before long.

Something in the watery glimmer of its graphics made me hunt out the instruction leaflet and look up the makers’ name. PSP: Pelagic Software Products, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deepnet Communications, Inc. Here is their message to the new generation.

At this point in my speculations I was struck with a vivid image of Janine telling me with her usual twinkle that I am just a thoughtless, sexist beast. Fancy imagining all these terrible consequences for pregnant women, “the weaker vessel,” while giving hardly a thought to my own very much longer hours working with Deepnet development software. Twelve years now, at least. Might there not be accumulated effects in my body, my brain?

I am terribly frightened that I may already know the answer to that question. In a few years, when the time comes, when her time comes, it will perhaps destroy me unless I first destroy myself. My hands and forehead are unpleasantly damp as I type these final sentences into the edit screen of Deepword 6.01.

Deepnet. Bringing together the best of the old and new generations. The software family that rides the tide of tomorrow.

Breeding, and in-breeding. These insights come in a single hot moment. Turning to look again at Sara, I see those big protruding eyes fixed raptly on the screen, and her broad face tinged a soft, delicate green by its light. Overwhelmingly I can imagine the salt-sea smell of her, and I love her and I want her.

TO SEE THE SEA

by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

WHEN THE BUS reached the top of the hill that finally brought the ocean into view, Susan turned to me and grinned.

“I can see the sea!” she said, sounding about four years old. I smiled back and put my arm round her shoulders, and we turned to look out of the window. Beyond the slight reflection of our own faces the view consisted of a narrow strip of light grey cloud, above a wide expanse of dark grey sea. The sea came up to meet a craggy beach, which was also grey.

The driver showed no sign of throwing caution to the winds and abandoning his self-imposed speed limit of thirty miles an hour, and so we settled ourselves down to wait. The ride had already involved two hours of slow meandering down deserted country lanes. Another thirty minutes wouldn’t kill us.

We could at least now see what we had come for, and as we gazed benignly out of the window I could feel both of us relax. True, the sea didn’t look quite as enticing as it might at, say, Bondi Beach, and the end of October was possibly not the best time to be here, but it was better than nothing. It was better than London.

In the four months Susan and I had been living together, life had been far from sweet. We both worked at the same communications company, an organisation run on panic and belligerence. It ought to have been an exciting job, but every day at the office was like wading through knee-high mud in a wasteland of petty grievances and incompetence. Every task the company undertook was botched and flawed: even the car park was a disaster. Built in the shape of a wedge, it meant that anyone at the far end had to get all those parked between them and the exit to come and move their cars before they could leave. About once a fortnight our car wouldn’t start, despite regular visits to the world’s least conveniently situated garage.

The flat we had moved into was beautiful, but prey to similar niggling problems. The boiler, which went out twice a day, was situated below the kitchen, so we had no hot water to wash up with. Lightbulbs in the flat went at forty-minute intervals, each turning out to be some bizarre Somalian make which was unavailable in local stores. The old twonk who lived underneath us managed to combine a hardness of hearing that required his television to play at rock concert volume with a sensitivity that led him to shout up through the floor if we so much as breathed after eleven o’clock.

Up until Thursday, we’d been planning to spend the weekend at home, as we usually did. By the time the working week had ended we were too tired to consider packing bags, checking tyre pressures and hauling ourselves out of town. Perversely, the very fact that the car had packed up again on Friday evening had probably provided the impetus for us to make the trip. It had just been one thing too many, one additional pebble of grief on a beach that seemed to stretch off in all directions.

“Fuck it,” Susan had snarled, when we finally made it back home. “Let’s get out of town.” The next morning we arose, brows furrowed, each grabbed a change of clothes, a toothbrush and a book, and stomped off to the tube station. And now, after brief periods on most of the trains that British Rail had to offer, we were there. Or nearly there, anyway.

As the bus clattered its elderly way down the coast, it passed a sign for Dawton, now allegedly only eight miles away. Judging by the state of the signpost, the village’s whereabouts were of only cursory interest to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. The name was printed in black on an arrow that must once have been white, but was now grey and streaked with old rain tracks. It looked as though no one had bothered to clean it for a while.

Virtually all of the minor annoyances which had been plaguing our every day were trivial in themselves. It was simply their volume and relentlessness which was getting us down. The result was a state of constant flinching, in which neither of us were fully ourselves. The paradoxical advantage of this was that we were getting to know each other very quickly, seeing sides of each other that would normally sit in obeisance for years. We found ourselves opening up to each other, blurting secrets as we struggled to find a new equilibrium.

One of these secrets, divulged very late one night when we were both rather tired and emotional, had involved Susan’s mother. I already knew that her mother had carved her name in Susan’s psyche by leaving her father when Susan was five, and by never bothering to get in touch again. A need for security was amongst the reasons that Susan had fallen into the clutches of her ridiculous ex-boyfriend. Before her mother had gone, however, it transpired that she had managed to instil a different kind of fear in her daughter.

In 1955, ten years before Susan was born and five before she married, Geraldine Stanbury went on a holiday. She was gone three weeks, touring around European ports with a couple of friends from college. On their return, the ship, which was called the Aldwinkle, was hugging the coast of England against a storm when a disaster occurred. The underside of the ship’s hull was punctured and then ripped apart by an unexpected rock formation, and the boat went down. By an enormous stroke of good fortune an area within the ship remained airtight, and all three hundred and ten passengers and crew were able to hole up there until help arrived the next morning. In the end, not a single person was lost, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the wreck of the Aldwinkle has failed to become a well-known part of English disaster lore.

Susan’s mother told her this story often when she was a child, laying great stress on what it had been like to be trapped under the water, not knowing whether help would come. As Susan told me this, sitting tensely on the rug in our flat, I was temporarily shocked out of drunkenness, and sat up to hold her hand. A couple of weeks previously we had come close to a small argument over where to take the holiday we had been looking forward to. Having been raised in a coastal town I love the sea, and had suggested St. Augustine, on the Florida coast. Susan had demurred, in an evasive way, and suggested somewhere more inland. The reasons for this now seemed more clear.

After Mrs. Stanbury had left, the story of her near death continued to prey on her daughter’s mind, though in different ways. As she’d grown up, questions had occurred to her. Like why, for example, there had not been a light showing at that point in the coast, when dangerous rocks were under the water. And why no one in the nearby village had raised an alarm until the following morning. The ship had gone down within easy view of the shore: was it really possible that no one had seen its distress? And if someone had seen, what on earth could have compelled them to keep silent until it should have been too late?

The village in question was that of Dawton, a negligible hamlet on the west coast of England. As I held Susan that night, trying to keep her warm against the bewilderment which years of asking the same questions had formed, I suggested that we should visit the village some time, to exorcise the ghosts it held for her. For of course no one could have seen the ship in distress, or an alarm would have been raised. And lighthouses sometimes fail.

When we got up for work the next morning, both more than a little hungover, such a trip seemed less important. In the next couple of weeks, however, during which we had two further nights on which the hardships of the day drove us to spend the evening in the pub, where we could not be contacted, the idea was mentioned again. It was a time for clearing out, in both our lives. One of the ways in which we were battling against the avalanche of trivia which still sometimes threatened to engulf us was by sorting out the things we could, by seeking to tidy away elements of our past which might have detrimental effects on our future together.

And so on the Friday when Susan finally demanded we get out of town, I suggested a pilgrimage to Dawton, and she agreed.

***

As the archaic bus drew closer to the village I noticed that Susan grew a little more tense. I was about to make a joke, about something, I’m not sure what, when she spoke.

“It’s very quiet out here.”

It was. We hadn’t passed a car in the last ten or fifteen minutes. That was no great surprise: as the afternoon grew darker the weather looked set to change for the worse, and judging from its size on the map, there would be little to draw people to Dawton unless they happened to live there. I said as much.

“Yes, but still.”

I was about to ask her what she meant when I noticed a disused farm building by the side of the road. On its one remaining wall someone had painted a large swastika in black paint. Wincing, I pointed it out to Susan, and we shook our heads as middle-class liberals will when confronted with the forces of unreason.

“Hang on though,” she said, after a moment. “Isn’t it the wrong way round?” She was right, and I laughed. “Christ,” she said. “To be that stupid, to do something so mindless, and still to get it wrong...”

Then a flock of seagulls wheeling just outside the window attracted our attention. They were scraggy and unattractive birds, and fluttered close to the window in a disorganised but vaguely threatening way. As we watched, however, I was trying to work out what the swastika reminded me of, and trying to puzzle out why someone should have come all this way to paint it. We were still two miles from Dawton. It seemed a long way to come to daub on a disused wall, and unlikely that such a small coastal town should be racked with racial tension.

Ten minutes later the bus rounded a final bend, and the village of Dawton was in sight. I turned and raised my eyebrows at Susan. She was staring intently ahead. Sighing, I started to extricate our bag from beneath the seat. I hoped Susan wasn’t building too much on this sleepy village. I don’t know what I was expecting the weekend to bring: a night at a drab bed and breakfast, probably, with a quiet stroll down the front before dinner. I imagined that Susan would want to look out across the sea, to try to imagine the place where her mother had nearly lost her life, and that would be it. The next day we would return to London. To hope for anything more, for a kiss that would heal all childhood wounds, would be asking a little too much.

“You getting off, or what?”

Startled, we looked up to the front of the bus. The vehicle had stopped, apparently at random, fifty yards clear of the first dishevelled houses that stood on the land side of the road.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Bus stops here.”

I turned to Susan, and we laughed.

“What, it doesn’t go the extra hundred yards into the village?”

“Stops here,” the man said again. “Make your mind up.”

We clambered rather huffily down out of the bus onto the side of the road. Before the door was fully shut, the driver had the bus in reverse. He executed a three point turn at greater than his usual driving speed, and then sped off up the road away from the village.

“Extraordinary man,” said Susan.

“Extraordinary git, more like.” I turned and looked over the low wall we had been dumped beside. A stone ramp of apparent age led down to a stony strip of beach, against which the grey water was lapping with some force. “Now what?”

From where we stood the coast bent around to our left, enabling us to see the whole of the village in its splendour. Houses much like those just ahead accounted for most of the front, with a break about halfway along where there appeared to be some kind of square. Other dwellings went back a couple of streets from the front, soon required to cling to the sharp hills which rose less than two hundred yards from the shore. An air of gradual decay hung over the scene, of negligent disuse. The few cars we could see parked looked old and haggard, and the smoke issuing thinly from a couple of chimneys only helped to underline the general air of desertion. Susan looked contrite.

“I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come.”

“Of course we should. The answering machine will be half-full of messages already, and I’m glad it’s listening to them and we’re not.”

“But it’s so dismal.” She was right. Dismal was the word, rather than quiet. Anywhere can be quiet. Quiet just means that there isn’t much noise. Dawton was different. Noise wouldn’t have been an improvement.

“Dawton’s dismal,” I said, and she giggled. “Come on. Let’s find a disappointing guest house that doesn’t have a TV in each room, never mind tea and coffee-making facilities.”

She grabbed me by the hand, kissed my nose, and we turned to walk. Just a yard in front of us, obscured by sand and looking much older than the one on the wall we had seen, another swastika was painted on the pavement. Again it was the wrong way round. I shook my head, puzzled, and then walked over it on our way towards the houses.

***

“We could try this one, I suppose.”

“What d’you reckon?”

“It doesn’t look any nicer than the other one.”

“No.”

We were standing at one corner of Dawton’s square, outside the village’s second pub. We had already rejected one on the way from the guest house. We weren’t expecting a CD jukebox and deep-fried camembert, but we’d thought we could probably find better. Now we were beginning to doubt it.

Susan leaned forward to peer through the window.

“We could go straight to a restaurant,” I suggested.

“If there is one.”

In the end we nervously decided to have a quick drink in the pub. If nothing else the landlord should be able to tell us where the town restaurant was. Susan pushed the heavy wooden door, and I followed her in.

The pub consisted of a single bare room. Though it was cold no fire burned in the grate, and the predominance of old stained wood failed to bring any warmth to the ambience. A number of chairs surrounded the slab-like tables, each furnished with a tattered cushion for a seat. The floor was of much-worn boards, with a few faded rugs. There was no one to be seen, either in the body of the room or behind the bar.

After a searching look at each other, we walked up to the bar, and I leaned over. The area behind was narrow, almost like a corridor, and extended beyond the wall of the room we were in. By craning my neck I could see that there appeared to be another room on the other side of the wall. It could have been another bar except that it was completely dark, and there were no pumps or areas to store glasses. I pointed this out to Susan, and we frowned at each other. At the end of the bar area was a door, which was shut. After a pause, I shouted hello.

It wasn’t much of a shout, because I was feeling rather intimidated by the sepulchral quiet of the room, but it rang out harshly all the same. We both flinched, and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to be wrenched open. It wasn’t, and I said hello again, a little more loudly this time.

A faint sound, possibly one of recognition, seemed to come from behind the door. I say “seemed” because it was very faint, and appeared to come from a greater distance than you would have expected. Loath to shout again, in case we had already been heard, we shrugged and perched ourselves on two ragged barstools to wait.

The situation was strangely similar to that which we had encountered on entering the guest house in which we would be spending the night. We had only walked about ten houses down the line from where the bus had deposited us before we saw a sign nailed unceremoniously to the front of one of them, advertising rooms for the night. We’d entered, and loitered for a good few minutes in front of a counter before an elderly woman creaked out of a back room to attend to us.

The room we were shown was small, ill-favoured and faced away from the sea. Naturally it had neither a television nor drink-making facilities, and you could only have swung a cat in it if you had taken care to provide the animal with a crash helmet first. As the rest of the house seemed utterly deserted we asked the woman if we could have a room with a sea-view instead, but she had merely shaken her head. Susan, fiendish negotiator that she is, had mused aloud for a moment on whether a little extra money could obtain such a view for us. The woman had shaken her head again, and said they were “booked.”

I discovered a possible reason for this when down in the sitting room of the house, waiting for Susan to finish dressing for the evening. It was a dark and poky room, notwithstanding its large window, and I would not have chosen to spend much time there. The idea of simply sitting in it was frankly laughable. The chairs were lumpy and ill-fashioned, their archaic design so uncomfortable it seemed scarcely conceivable that they had been designed with humans in mind, and the window gave directly out onto a gloomy prospect of dark grey sea and clouds. I was there only because I had already seen enough of our small room, and because I hoped I might be able to source some information on likely eating places in the village.

At first I couldn’t find anything, which was odd. Usually the guest houses of small towns on the coast are bristling with literature advertising local attractions, produced in the apparent hope that the promise of some dull site thirty miles away might induce the unwary into staying an extra night. The house we were staying in, however, clearly wished to be judged on its own merits, or else simply couldn’t be bothered. Though I looked thoroughly over all the available surfaces, I couldn’t find so much as a card.

I was considering without much enthusiasm the idea of tracking down the old crone to ask her advice when I discovered something lying on the sill in front of the window. It was a small pamphlet, photocopied and stapled together, and the front bore the words Dawton Festival. It also mentioned a date, the 30th of October, which happened to be the following day.

There was nothing by way of editorial on the Festival itself, bar the information that it would start at three o’clock in the afternoon. Presumably the unspecified festivities continued into the evening, hence the drabness of our berth. The guest house’s more attractive rooms had obviously been booked for two nights in advance, by forthcoming visitors to what promised to be the west coast’s least exciting event.

I couldn’t glean much of interest from the booklet, which had been typeset with extraordinary inaccuracy, to the point where some of it didn’t even look as if it was in English. Most of the scant pages were filled with small advertisements for businesses whose purposes remained obscure. There was no mention of a restaurant. The centre spread featured a number of terribly reproduced photographs purporting to show various notables of the town, including, believe it or not, a “Miss Dawton.” Her photograph in particular had suffered from being badly photocopied too many times, and was almost impossible to make out. Her figure blended with the background tones, making her appear rather bulky, and the pale ghost of her face was so distorted as to appear almost misshapen.

I was about to shout again, this time audibly, when the door at the end of the bar seemed to tremble slightly. Susan started, and I stood up in readiness.

The door didn’t open. Instead we both heard a very distant sound, like that of footsteps on wet pavements. It sounded so similar, in fact, that I turned to look at the outer door of the pub, half-expecting to see the handle turn as one of the locals entered. It didn’t, though, and I returned to looking at the door. The sounds continued, getting gradually closer. They sounded hollow somehow, as if they were echoing slightly. Susan and I looked at each other, frowning once more.

The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door, and there was a long pause. I was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn’t perhaps have been better off with the first pub we’d seen when the door suddenly swung open, and a man stepped out behind the bar.

Without so much as glancing in our direction he shut the door behind him and then turned his attention to the ancient till. He opened it by pressing on some lever, and then began to sort through the money inside in a desultory fashion.

I think we both assumed that he would stop this after a moment or so, despite the fact that he had given no sign of seeing us. When he didn’t, Susan nudged me, and I coughed a small cough. The man turned towards us with an immediacy and speed which rather disconcerted me, and stood, eyebrows raised. After a pause I smiled in a way I hoped looked friendly rather than nervous.

“Good evening,” I said. The man didn’t move. He just stood, half-turned towards us, with his hands still in the till and his eyebrows still in the air. He didn’t even blink. I noticed that his eyes were slightly protuberant, and that the skin round his ears looked rough, almost scaly. His short black hair was styled as if for pre-war fashion, and appeared to have been slicked back with Brylcreem or something similar. A real blast from the past. Or from something, anyway.

After he’d continued to not say anything for a good ten seconds or so, I had another shot.

“Could we have two halves of lager, please?”

As soon as I started speaking again the man turned back to the till. After I’d finished there was a pause, and then finally he spoke.

“No.”

“Ah,” I said. It wasn’t really a reply. It was just a response to the last thing I was expecting a publican to say.

“Don’t have any beer.”

I blinked at him.

“None at all?”

He didn’t enlarge on his previous statement, but finished whatever he was doing, closed the till, and started moving small glasses from one shelf to another, still with his back to us. The glasses were about three inches high and oddly shaped, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out either what one might drink from them or why he was choosing to move them.

“A gin then,” Susan’s voice was fairly steady, but a little higher than usual, “with tonic?” She normally had a slice of lemon too, but I think she sensed it would be a bit of a long shot.

She got no reply at all. When all of the small glasses had been moved, the man opened the till again. Beginning to get mildly irritated, in spite of my increasing feeling of unease, I glanced at Susan and shook my head. She didn’t smile, but just stared back at me, face a little pinched. I looked back at the man, and after a moment leant forward to see more closely.

His hair hadn’t been slicked back, I realised. It was wet. Little droplets hung off the back in a couple of places, and the upper rim of his shirt was soaked. There had been a fine drizzle earlier on, enough to make the pavements damp. We’d walked most of the way from the guest house in it, and suffered no more than a fine dusting of moisture. So why was his hair so wet? Why, in fact, had he been out at all? Shouldn’t he have been tending his (surprisingly beer-free) pumps?

He could have just washed it, I supposed, but that didn’t seem likely. Not this man, at this time in the evening. And surely he would have dried it enough to prevent it dripping off onto his shirt, and running down the back of his neck? Peeking forward slightly I saw that his shoes were wet too, hence the wet footsteps we had heard. But where had he come from? And why was his hair wet?

Suddenly the man swept the till shut and took an unexpected step towards me, until he was right up against the bar. Taken aback, I just stared at him, and he looked me up and down as if I was a stretch of old and dusty wallpaper.

“Do you have anything we could drink?” I asked, finally. He frowned slightly, and then his face went blank again.

“Is there a place round here we can buy food?” Susan asked. She sounded halfway to angry, which meant she was very frightened indeed.

The man stared at me for a moment more, and then raised his right arm. I flinched slightly, but all he was doing, it transpired, was pointing. Arm outstretched, still looking at me, he was pointing in the opposite direction to the door. And thus, I could only assume, in the direction of somewhere we could buy some food.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you.” Susan slid off her stool and preceded me to the door. I felt the back of my neck tickle all of the way there, as if I was frightened that something might suddenly crash into it. Nothing did, and Susan opened the door and stepped out. I followed her, and turned to pull the door shut. The man was still standing, arm outstretched, but his face had turned to watch us go, his eyes on Susan. Something about the way the light fell, or about the strangeness of his behaviour, made me think that there might be something else about his face, something I hadn’t really noticed before. I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.

When I stepped out onto the pavement the first thing I saw was that it had started to rain a little harder, a narrow slant of drizzle which showed in front of the few and dingy streetlights. The second thing was Susan, who was standing awkwardly, her body turned out towards the street, head and shoulders faced to me. She was staring upwards, and her mouth was slightly open.

“What?” I said, a little sharply. I wasn’t irritated, just rather spooked. She didn’t say anything. I took a step towards her and turned to see.

I never really notice pub signs. Most of the time I go to pubs I know, and so they’re of no real interest to me. On other occasions I just, well I just fail to notice them. They’re too high up, somehow, and not terribly interesting. So I hadn’t noticed the one hanging outside this pub either, before we went in. I did now.

The sign was old and battered, the wood surround stained dark. A tattered and murky painting showed a clumsily rendered ship in the process of sinking beneath furiously slashing waves. Below there was a name. The pub was called The Aldwinkle.

***

Ten o’clock found us pushing plates away, lighting cigarettes, and generally feeling a little better. With nothing to go on apart from the publican’s scarcely effusive directions, we’d wandered along the front for a while, coats wrapped tight around us and saying little. We were in danger of running out of front and considering turning back when we came upon a small house in which a light was glowing. The window had been enlarged almost the full width of the house, and inside we could see a few tables laid out. All the tables were empty.

We stood outside for a moment, wondering whether we could face any more of Dawton’s version of hospitality, when a young man crossed the back of the room. He was tidily dressed as a waiter, and failed, at that distance, to give us any obvious reason for disquiet. His whole demeanour, even through glass, was so different from that which we had encountered so far that we elected to shoulder our misgivings and go in.

The waiter greeted us cordially and sat us, and the tension which, I realised belatedly, had been growing within us since the afternoon abated slightly. The young man was also the proprietor and cook, it transpired, and was moreover from out of town. He told us this when we observed, quite early into the meal, that he didn’t seem like the other villagers we’d met. Soon afterwards the main course arrived and he disappeared into the kitchen to leave us to it.

We drank quite a lot during the meal. As soon as we sat down we knew we were going to, and ordered two bottles of wine to save time. We hadn’t spoken much during the walk, not because we didn’t feel there was much to say, but almost as if there was too much. Susan hadn’t looked out over the sea, either, though there was once or twice when I thought she might be about to.

“Why would they call a pub that?”

Susan was still trembling slightly when she finally asked. Not a great deal, because it would take a lot to unseat her that much. But her hands are normally very steady, and I could see her fork wavering slightly as she waited for me to answer. I’d had time to think about it, to come up with what I hoped was a reasonable suggestion.

“I guess because it’s the most interesting thing which ever happened here.”

Susan looked at me and shook her head firmly, before putting another fork of the really quite passable lamb into her mouth. We’d looked for fish on the menu initially, assuming it would be the specialty of the house as in all small coastal towns, and were surprised to find not a single dish available. I’d asked the waiter about it, but he’d simply smiled vaguely and shaken his head.

“No,” she said, finally. “That’s not the reason.”

I opened my mouth to press my claim, and then shut it again. I didn’t believe it either. Perhaps it was just because of the behaviour of the publican, or the overall atmosphere of the town. Maybe it was just the colour of the sky, or the way the rain angled as it fell, but somehow I just didn’t quite believe that there wasn’t more to the pub’s name than a simple remembrance. There’d been something about the painting, some aspect of its style or colours, that hinted at something else, some more confused or inexplicable element. To name a pub after a ship that sank in—possibly—dubious circumstances, and to put that ship’s name up on a sign with a painting that seemed almost to have some intangible air of celebration about it, hardly seemed like amiable quaintness.

But such speculations weren’t what we were here for, and I saw my job as being that of steering Susan away from them. Although there was something a little strange about the whole thing, it didn’t mean that the villagers had tried to cause harm to the passengers of the Aldwinkle thirty-odd years ago. It simply didn’t make sense: what could possibly have been in it for them? Either way I didn’t want the weekend to compound Susan’s suspicions. Her mother’s blatherings had left her with more than enough distrust of the human race. We’d come here to try to undermine that, not provide documentary evidence to support it.

So I steered the conversation away from the sign, and focused on the publican. There was enough material for speculation and vitriol there to keep us going to the other side of dessert, by which time we were more than a little drunk and rambling rather. By the time the waiter came through with our coffees I thought Susan had left more disturbing thoughts behind.

I was wrong. As he stood at the end of the table she turned on him.

“What do you know about the Aldwinkle?” she said, challengingly. The waiter’s hand paused for just a moment as he laid the milk jug down. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe I imagined it.

“It’s a pub,” he said. Susan tried again, but that was all he would say. As he’d observed, he was from out of town and only came to Dawton to work. He sat at an adjoining table as we finished our third bottle of wine, and we chatted a little. Business wasn’t going well, it would seem, and we’d made it to the restaurant just in time. Within a few weeks he suspected that he would probably have to give up. There simply wasn’t the custom, and we’d been his only patrons that evening.

We enquired as to what the locals did of an evening. He didn’t know. As we talked I began to sense an air of unease about him, as if he would prefer to discuss something other than the town and its inhabitants. Probably simply paranoia on my part. I was starting to realise that we were going to have to leave this haven, and return to our room. The thought did not fill me with glee.

In the end we paid, bid him goodnight, and stepped out onto the front. The first thing that struck me was the realisation that I was extremely drunk. I tend to drink just about everything as I would beer, that is in the same sort of quantity. This approach doesn’t work too well with wine. I’d probably had the better part of two bottles, and suddenly, as we stood swaying in the wind that whipped down the soulless stretch of the front, it felt like it.

Susan was a little the worse for wear too, and we stumbled in unison as we stepped off the kerb to walk across the road to the front. Susan slipped her hand underneath my coat and looped her arm around my back and, not saying anything, we stepped up onto the ragged pavement on the other side of the road.

It was late now, but a sallow moon spread enough light for us to see what lay in front of us. Beyond the low wall a ramp of decaying concrete sloped down to the shore. The shore appeared to consist of puddled mudflats, and stretched at least a hundred yards out to where still water the colour of slate took over. In the distance we could just hear the sound of small waves, like two hands slowly rubbed together.

“Tide’s out,” I observed sagely, except that it came out more like “tie shout.” I opened my eyes wide for a moment, blinked, and then fumbled in my pockets for a cigarette.

“Mn,” Susan replied, not really looking. She was gazing vaguely at the wall in front of us, for some reason not letting her eyes reach any higher. She shook her head when I offered her a smoke, which was unusual. I put a hand on the cold surface of the wall, for something to lean against, and looked back out at the sea.

When I was a kid my family often used to go on holiday to St. Augustine. Actually the place where we stayed was just outside, a little further down Crescent Beach in the direction of, but thankfully a good ways from, Daytona Beach. I remember standing on the unspoilt beach as a child, probably no more than five or six, and slowly turning to look out at the sea from different angles, and I remember thinking that you can’t ever really stand still when you’re looking at the sea. There’s nowhere you can stand and think “Yep, that’s the view,” because there’s always more of it on either side.

In Dawton it was different. There was only one way you could see it. Perhaps it was because of the curve of the bay, or maybe it was something else. Your eye was drawn outwards, as if there was only one way you could see the view, only one thing you could see.

Suddenly Susan’s arm was removed and she took a step forwards. Without looking at me she grabbed the wall purposefully with both hands and started to hoist herself over it.

“What’re you doing?” I demanded, stifling a hiccup.

“Going to see the sea.”

“But,” I started, and then wearily reached out to follow her. Obviously the time had come for Susan to do her staring out across the water. The best I could do was tag along, and be there if she wanted to talk.

The concrete ramp was wet and quite steep, and Susan almost lost her footing on the way down. I grabbed her shoulder and she regained her balance, but she didn’t say anything in thanks. She hadn’t really said anything to me since we’d left the restaurant. Her tone when telling me where she was going had been distant, almost irritable, as if she was annoyed at having to account for her actions. I tried not to take it personally.

When we got to the bottom of the ramp I stopped, swaying slightly. I peered owlishly at the stinking mud in front of us. Clearly, I thought, this was where the expedition ended. Susan felt otherwise. She stepped out onto the mud and started striding with as much determination as the ground and her inebriation would allow. I stared after her, feeling suddenly adrift. She didn’t seem herself, and I was afraid of something, of being left behind. Wincing, I put a tentative foot onto the mud and then hurried after her as best I could.

We walked a long way. The mud came in waves. For twenty yards it would be quite hard, and relatively dry, and then it would suddenly change and turn darker and wetter until, to be honest, it was like wading through shit. The first time this happened I tried to find dryer patches, to protect my shoes, but in the end I gave up. It was as much as I could do to keep up with Susan, who was striding head down towards the sea.

I glanced back at one point, and saw how far we’d come. When we’d stood on the front I’d thought the sea was a hundred yards or so away, but it must have been much further. I couldn’t see any lights in the houses on the front, or any of the streetlights. For an awful moment I thought that something must have happened, that everyone had turned their lights off so we wouldn’t be able to find our way back. I turned to shout to Susan but she was too far ahead to hear. Either that, or she ignored me. After another quick glance back I ran to catch up with her.

She was still walking, but her head was up and her movements were jerky and stilted. When I drew level with her I saw that she was crying.

“Susan,” I said. “Stop.” She walked on for a few more yards, tailing off, and then stopped. I put my hands on her shoulders and she held herself rigid for a moment, but then allowed herself to be folded into me. Her hair was cold against my face as we stood, surrounded by mud in every direction.

“What is it?” I said eventually. She sniffed.

“I want to see the sea.”

I raised my head and looked. The sea appeared as far away as it had when we’d been standing on the front.

“The tide must still be going out,” I said. I’m not sure if I believed it. Susan certainly didn’t.

“It’s not letting me,” she said, indistinctly. “And I don’t know why.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and just stared out at the water. I wondered how much further it was before the bay deepened, how much further to the crop of rocks where the Aldwinkle presumably still lay.

In the end we turned and walked back, Susan allowing me to keep my hand around her shoulders. She seemed worn out. I was beginning to develop a headache, while still feeling rather drunk. When we got back to the ramp we climbed halfway up it and then sat down for a cigarette. My shoes, I noticed belatedly, were ruined, caked about a centimetre thick in claggy mud. I took them off and set them to one side.

“This weekend isn’t going quite as I thought it would,” I said, eventually.

“No.”

I couldn’t tell from Susan’s tone whether she thought this was a good or a bad thing.

We looked out at the water for a while in silence. Now we were back it looked little more than a hundred yards away, two hundred at the most. It couldn’t have moved. We simply can’t have walked as far as we’d thought we had, which is odd, because it felt like we’d walked forever.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“It’s out there somewhere,” she said.

I nodded. It wasn’t a direct reply, but in another sense I guess it was. “Was it the sea you wanted to see?” I ventured.

“I don’t know,” she said, and her head dropped.

A little later we stood up. I decided to leave my shoes where they were. They weren’t an especially nice pair, and it seemed less troublesome to leave them there than to find some way of taking them home in their current state and then cleaning them. On a different evening, in a different mood, leaving them might have felt like a gesture of some kind, something wild and devil-may-care. Instead I just felt a little confused and sad, as well as vulnerable and exposed.

***

Susan warmed up a little on the walk back along the front, enlivened slightly by a stream of weak jokes from me. After a while I felt her cold hand seek out mine, and I grasped it and did my best to warm it up. The village we passed in front of seemed to have died utterly during the course of the evening. The streets were silent and not a single light showed in any of the windows. It was like walking beside a photograph of a ghost town.

Until we got closer to our guest house, that is. From a way off we could see that all the lights seemed to be on, though dimly, and as we approached we began to hear the sound of car doors slamming carried on the quiet air. About fifty yards away we stopped.

The street outside the house, which had been empty when we’d arrived, was lined both sides with cars. The lights were on, on all three floors. They looked dim because in each window a shade was pulled down. The other guests had evidently arrived.

As we looked, someone moved behind one of the upper windows. The angle of the light behind him or her cast a grotesquely shaped shadow on the blind, and I found myself shivering for no evident reason. Quietly, and to myself, I wished that we were staying somewhere else. Like London.

I was fumbling for our key on the doorstep when suddenly the door was pulled wide. Warm yellow light spilled out of the hallway and Susan and I looked up, blinking, to see the old lady proprietor standing in front of us. My first befuddled thought was that we must have transgressed some curfew and she was about to berate us for being late.

Far from it. The old crone’s manner was bizarrely improved, and she greeted us with strange and twittering warmth before ushering us into the hallway. Once there she steered us into the sitting room before we’d even had time to draw breath, though we had no desire to go there. Susan entered the room first and glanced back at me. I opened my eyes wide to signal my bafflement. Susan shrugged, and we seemed to mutually decide that it would be easier to go along with it.

The old woman flapped us towards some chairs in the centre of the room and offered us a cup of tea. My first impulse was to refuse—I was beginning to sag rather by then—but then remembered that our room didn’t have so much as a kettle, and accepted. The woman clapped her hands together in apparent delight, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Susan glancing at me again. There was nothing I could tell her. None of it was making any sense to me either, and as soon as the woman left the room I turned to Susan and said so. I also observed that there seemed to be something gaudy and strange about the old woman. She looked different.

“She’s wearing make-up,” she said. “And that dress?”

The dress, made of some dark green material, was certainly not to my taste, and the make-up had been hastily applied, but it clearly spoke of some effort being made. Presumably it was the new guests, whoever they might be, who merited such a transformation. We looked round the room, feeling slightly ill at ease. On the table to one side of me I noticed something.

A pamphlet for the Dawton Festival lay next to the large glass ashtray. I looked across at the windowsill and saw that the one I had consulted earlier was still there. For want of anything else to do I picked it up and showed it to Susan. Flicking through the pages a second time failed to furnish us with any more information on what the Festival might consist of. When we got to the centre pages I nudged Susan, looking forward to drawing her attention to the oddity of a Dawton Beauty contest. But when my finger was pointing at the photo I suddenly stopped.

I realised now what had struck me about the publican in The Aldwinkle, the aspect of his appearance which I hadn’t been able to put my finger on. There had been something about the shape of his head, the ratio of its width to its depth, the bone structure and the positioning of the ears, which reminded me forcibly of the degraded photograph of “Miss Dawton.” I couldn’t believe that she actually looked like that, that I was seeing something other than the result of dark and badly reproduced tones blending into each other, but still the resemblance was there.