Shadows Over Innsmouth

“It must be his daughter.”

When Susan spoke I turned to her, startled.

“It’s just the printing,” I said. “She can’t look like that.” Susan shook her head firmly.

“It’s his daughter.”

The door slid quietly open and I quickly slipped the leaflet to one side, trying to hide it. I don’t know why: it just seemed like a good idea. It didn’t work.

“Will you be staying for the Festival?” the old woman croaked, laying two cups of brick-red tea down on the table. She addressed her comment to Susan, who said no. Our plan, as discussed in the restaurant, was to rise early the next morning and get the hell back to London. I was loath to question her too closely on what the Festival might involve, because I was aware that I was enunciating my words very carefully to keep the drunkenness out of my voice. On the few occasions when Susan spoke I heard her doing the same thing.

As we sat there, sipping our tea and listening to her rustling voice, I began to feel a curious mixture of relaxation and unease. If the Festival was such a draw, why wouldn’t she tell us about it? And was it my imagination or did she cock her head slightly every now and then, as if listening for something?

A few moments later the second question at least seemed to be answered. We heard the sound of the front door being opened and then, after a long pause, being shut again. Still talking in her dry and uninformative voice the old crone slipped over towards the door to the sitting room and then, instead of going out, gently pushed it shut. She carried on talking for a few moments as Susan and I watched her, wondering what she was up to. Perhaps it was my tired mind, but her chatter seemed to lose cohesion for a while, as if her attention was elsewhere. After a couple of moments she came to herself again, and re-opened the door. Then, with surprising abruptness, she said goodnight and left the room.

Coming at the end of a day which felt like it had lasted forever, the whole vignette was almost laughable: not because it was funny, but because it was odd in some intangible way that made you want to cover it with sound. Neither of us felt much like actually laughing, I suspect, as we levered ourselves out of the dreadfully uncomfortable chairs and made our way unsteadily upstairs.

I was especially quiet on the stairs, because I wasn’t wearing any shoes. Strange, perhaps, that the old woman had either not noticed this or had chosen not to make any comment.

***

My memories ofthe next hour or so are confused and very fragmentary. I wish they weren’t, because somewhere in them may be some key to what happened afterwards. I don’t know. This is what I remember.

We went upstairs to our room, passing doors under which lights shone brightly, and behind which low voices seemed to be murmuring. As we wove down the corridor I thought at first that a soft smoke was beginning to percolate down from the ceiling. It wasn’t, of course. I simply wasn’t seeing very well. I felt suddenly very drunk again: more drunk, in fact, than at any point in the evening. Susan, though only a pace or two in front of me, seemed a very long way ahead, and walking that short corridor seemed to take much longer than it should.

A sudden hissing noise behind one of the doors made me veer clumsily to the other side of the corridor, where I banged into an opposite door. It seemed to me that some sound stopped then, though I couldn’t remember what it had been. As I leaned my head on the door to our room and tried to remember how you used a key I found myself panting slightly, my shoulders slumped and weak. Another wave of vagueness surged into my head and I turned laboriously to Susan, who was standing weaving by my side, and asked her if she felt all right. She answered by suddenly clapping her hands over her mouth and stumbling away towards the toilet.

I leaned in the direction she’d gone, realised or decided that I wouldn’t be much help, and fell into our room instead. The light switch didn’t seem important, either because of the weak moonlight filtering into the room or because I couldn’t be bothered to find it. I flapped my way out of my coat with sluggish brutality and sat heavily on the bed. I started unbuttoning my shirt and then suddenly gave up. I simply couldn’t do it.

As I sat there, slumped over, I realised that I was feeling even worse. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so bad, or even what exactly the problem was. It reminded me of a time when I’d had food poisoning after a dodgy seafood pizza. A few hours after the meal I’d started feeling... well, just odd, really, in a way I found difficult to define. I didn’t feel particularly ill, just completely disconnected and altogether strange. I now felt roughly similar, though as if I’d drunk all the wine in the world and taken acid as well. The room seemed composed of dark wedges of colour which had no relation to objects or spaces, and if asked to describe it I wouldn’t have known where to start.

Suddenly remembering that Susan was throwing up in the toilet I jerked my head up, wondering again if I should go to her aid, and then I passed out.

Susan’s skin was warm and almost sweaty. We rolled and I felt myself inside her, with no idea of how I’d got there. I have images of the side of her chin, of one of her hands and of her hair falling over my face: but no memory of her eyes.

I think I felt wetness on my cheek at one point, as if she cried again, but all I really remember is the heat, the darkness, and not really being there at all.

***

The first thing I did when I woke was to moan weakly. I was lying on my side facing the window, and a weak ray of sun was shining on my head. My brain felt as if it had been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, and the last thing I needed was light. I wanted very much to turn away from it, but simply didn’t have what it took. So I moaned instead.

After a few minutes I slowly rolled over onto my back, and immediately noticed that Susan wasn’t beside me. I had a dim memory of her eventually coming to bed the night before, and so assumed that she must have woken first and be taking a shower. I rolled back over onto my side and reached pitifully out towards the little table by the bed. My cigarettes weren’t there, which was odd. I always have a cigarette last thing before going to sleep. Except last night, by the look of it.

Suddenly slightly more awake, I levered myself into a sitting position. What had I done before going to bed? I couldn’t really remember. My coat was lying in a tangle on the floor, and I experienced a sudden flashback of thrashing my way out of it. Reaching down I found my cigarettes and lighter in the pocket and distractedly lit up. As I squinted painfully around the room I noticed something out of place.

Susan’s washing bag was on the chair by the window.

Looking back, I knew from that moment something was wrong. I went through the motions in the right order and with only gradually increasing speed, but I knew right at that moment.

Susan’s washing bag was still here in the room. She hadn’t taken it with her, which didn’t make sense. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom not to wash, but to be ill again. I clambered out of bed, head throbbing, and threaded myself into some clothes with about as much ease as pushing yarn through the eye of a needle. On the way out of the room I grabbed her washing bag, just in case.

The bathroom was deserted. There was no one in the stalls, and both the bath and the shower cubicles were empty. Not only empty, but cold, and silent, and dry. I walked back to the room quickly, my head feeling much clearer already. Strangely clear, in fact: it generally takes an hour or so for my head to start recovering from a hangover. Hands on hips I looked around the room and tried to work out where she’d be. Then I noticed the shade of the clouds outside, and suddenly turned to look at my watch on the table.

It was twenty to four in the afternoon.

For a moment I had a complete sensation of panic, as if I’d overslept and missed the most important meeting of my life. Or even worse, perhaps, as if it were just starting, this minute, on the other side of town. The feeling subsided, but only slightly, as I scrabbled round the room for some more clothes. Normally I have to bathe in the mornings, will simply not enter company without doing so: which is part of why I say now that I already knew something was wrong. Perhaps something that had happened the night before, something that I had forgotten, told me that things were amiss. A bath didn’t seem important.

It took five minutes to find the room keys where I’d dropped them, and then I locked the room and walked quickly down the corridor. I ducked my head into the bathroom again, but nothing had changed. As I passed one of the other doors I flinched slightly, expecting to hear some sound, but none came. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting.

The lower floor of the guest house was equally deserted. I checked in what passed as the breakfast room, although they would obviously have stopped serving by late afternoon. I stood in front of the desk and even rang the bell, but no one appeared. Pointlessly I ran back upstairs again, checked the room, and even knocked timidly on one of the other doors. There was no response.

Downstairs again I wandered into the sitting room, wondering what to do. There was no reason for the increasing unease and downright fright I was feeling. Susan wouldn’t have just left me. She must be out in town somewhere, with everyone else. It was Festival day, after all. Maybe she’d wanted to see it. Maybe she’d told me that last night, and I’d been too splatted to take it in.

The two cups we’d drunk tea out of the night before were still there, still sitting on the table next to the Festival pamphlet. Frowning, I walked towards them. Guest house landladies are generally obsessed with tidiness. And where was she, anyway? Surely she didn’t just abandon her guest house because a poxy town Festival was on?

As I looked at the cups I experienced a sudden lurching in my stomach, which puzzled me. It was almost like a feeling I used to get looking through the window of a certain pizza chain, when I saw the thick red sauce that coated the pizzas on the plates of the people inside. When you’ve seen and felt that same sauce coming out of your nose while you’re buckled up over a toilet in the small hours, you tend not to feel too positive about it in the future. The reaction has nothing to do with your mind, but a lot to do with the voiceless body making its warning clear in the only way it can.

A feeling of nausea. Why should I feel that about tea?

I moved a little closer to the table and peered into the cups. One had a small amount left in the bottom, which was to be expected: Susan never quite finished a cup. My cup was empty. At the bottom of the cup, almost too faintly to be seen, the pottery sparkled slightly, as if something there was irregularly reflecting the light. Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach without warning, I kneeled beside the table to take a closer look.

I hadn’t had sugar in my tea last night. I never do. I gave it up three years ago and lost over half-a-stone, and I’m vain enough to want to keep it that way. But there was something in the bottom of the cup. I picked the other cup up and tilted it slightly. The small puddle of tea rocked to reveal a similar patch on the bottom. It was less defined than in my cup, but it was still there.

Something had been put in our tea.

I looked up suddenly at the door, sure that it had moved. I couldn’t see any difference, but I stood up anyway. I stood up and I ran out of the house.

As I walked quickly down the front towards the square I tried to make sense of what I’d found. To a degree it added up. I’d felt very, very strange when I’d gone upstairs the night before, strange in a way I’d never experienced through alcohol before. I’d hugely overslept too, which also made sense, and the hangover I’d woken up with had passed differently to usual.

As I approached the square I slowed down a little. I realised that I’d been expecting lots of people to be gathered there, celebrating this benighted village’s Festival. There was no one. The corner of the square I could see was as empty as it had been the night before.

Susan, on the other hand, had got up early. Which also made sense: she’d thrown up immediately after we’d drunk the tea. Less of it would have made it into her bloodstream, and she’d not have experienced the same effects. That made sense. That was fine.

But two things weren’t fine, and didn’t make sense whichever way I added them up.

First, most obviously, why had someone put something in our tea? This wasn’t a film, some Agatha Christie mystery: this was a small village on the English coast. Who would want to drug us, and why?

The second question was less clear-cut, but bothered me even more. Susan had an iron constitution, and could hold her drink. She could drink like a fish, to be honest. So why had she thrown up, so long after drinking, when I hadn’t?

Perhaps she was supposed to. Perhaps the drug, whatever it was, had different effects on different people.

The square was completely deserted. I stood still for a moment, trying to work out what to do next. There was no bunting, no posters, nothing to suggest a town event was in progress. I turned around slowly, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise. It was unnaturally quiet in that rotten, decomposing square, abnormally empty and silent. It didn’t just feel as if no one was there. It felt like the fucking Twilight Zone.

I walked across to The Aldwinkle and peered in through the window. The pub was empty and the lights were off, but I tried the door anyway. It was open. Inside I stood at the bar and shouted, but no one came. Something had happened in the pub after we had been there last night. Some of the chairs had been shunted to the side of the room, and others put in their place. They looked like the chairs in the guest house, ugly and misshapen. Their occupants had obviously had better luck when trying to buy a drink: a few of the small glasses lay scattered on one of the tables. One of the Festival pamphlets lay there too, and I irritably swatted it aside. It fluttered noisily to the floor and fell open, displaying its ridiculous inaccuracies. R’lyeh iä fhtagn!, for example. What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

It did at least make me think more clearly. The Festival had started at three o’clock. I knew that. What I didn’t know was where it had started. Presumably it took the form of a procession, which began at one end of the town and ended at another, possibly in the square. Perhaps I was here too early. I was now hopping from foot to foot with anxiety over Susan, and felt that anything had to be worth trying. If the Festival wouldn’t come to me, I’d bloody well go and find it.

I launched myself out of the pub, slamming the door shut behind me, and ran off towards the opposite corner of the square. I carried on up the little road, past yet more dilapidated houses, casting glances down narrow side roads. When the road began to peter out into cliffside I turned and went another way. And another. And another.

It didn’t take long for the streets to sap what little courage I’d injected myself with. It was like running through a dream where the horror you fear round each corner turns out to be the horror of nothing at all. No one leant on their fences, passing the time of day. No one was hanging out washing. No little children ran carelessly through the streets or up the cobbled alleys. No one, in short, was doing anything. All there was to see was rows of dirty houses, many with upper windows which seemed to have been boarded up. It was a ghost town.

And then I found something. Or thought I did.

I was moving a little more slowly by then, fifteen years of cigarettes taking their toll. To be absolutely honest I was bent over near a street corner, hands on my knees, vigorously coughing my guts up. When the fit subsided I raised my head and thought I heard something. A piping sound.

Jerking myself upright, I snapped my head this way and that, trying to determine where the sound was coming from. I thought it might be from back the way I’d come, perhaps in a parallel road, and jogged up the street. I couldn’t hear anything there, but I ducked into the next side road anyway. There I heard the sound again, a little louder, and something else: the rustle of distant conversation. Casting a fearful glance up at the darkening sky I pelted down the road.

I turned the corner cautiously. There was nothing there, but I knew there had been. I’d just missed it. I ran along the road to the next corner and listened, trying to work out which way the procession had gone. I chose left and soon heard noise again, louder this time: an odd tootling music, and the babble of strange voices. The sound made me pause for a moment, and another fragment of the previous evening slipped into my head. Was it a noise like that, an unwholesome and hateful gurgling, which I had heard behind one of the guest house doors?

Suddenly the sounds seemed to be coming from a different direction, and I whirled to follow them. Then, quite by chance, I happened to be looking over the abandoned garden of one of the houses I was passing when I saw something through the gap between it and its neighbour. Three sticks, about a foot apart, moving in the opposite direction to me. As they progressed they appeared to rock slightly, and it was that which made the connection. They weren’t just sticks. I couldn’t be certain, because it was now fairly dark. But to me they looked like little masts.

I’d thought I couldn’t run any faster, that my lungs would surely protest and perhaps burst. But I doubled back on myself and sprinted up the street, taking the corner on the slide. The street was empty but this time I was sure I saw the flicker of someone’s ankle as they disappeared around the corner, and I pelted down the road towards it.

I don’t know what made me glance at the house at the end. It was almost certainly just an accident, something for my head to do while my body did all the running. Just before I reached the end my eyes drifted across the filthy pane of its main window, and what I saw— or thought I saw—terrified me into losing my balance and falling. I seemed to take a long time to fall, and my mind insists that this is what I saw as I did.

A face, almost merged with the shadows of the room behind the window. A face that started off as something else, something unrecognisable and alien, something which slid and twitched into a normal face faster than the eye could see. A normal face that looked a little like the publican’s, and a little like Miss Dawton’s. And like, I realised, that of the old crone from the guest house, especially when we’d returned last night. It wasn’t simply make-up which had made the difference, far from it. If I hadn’t been so drunk I think I would have realised at the time. I think the make-up had been put on to hide something else.

And there was one more thing about the face. It looked a little bit like my mother.

All that passed through my head in the time it took me to fall, and was smacked out of it when my head cracked into a kerbstone.

My knee felt badly grazed and twisted, but I was up on my feet immediately, backing hurriedly away from the house. There was nothing to see in the window. No one was there. Maybe they never had been. Nevertheless I turned and ran away.

It started to rain then, at first drizzling, but then settling into a steady downpour. I plodded down one street after another, sometimes thinking I heard something, sometimes hearing nothing but water. My head hurt by then, and blood ran down the side of my face, mingling with the falling rain and running down into my shirt. At the slightest sound I started and whirled around, but too sluggishly to make any difference. I couldn’t seem to think in straight lines. It didn’t feel like it had the night before. It just felt as if I was terribly, miserably frightened.

In the end I gave up and headed towards the square as best I could, limping my way down the tangled streets. It should have occurred to me sooner I suppose, after all, I’d had the right idea in the beginning. I should have stayed where the procession might end. In retrospect I’m glad I was too stupid to realise that, but at the time I wearily cursed myself.

It didn’t make any difference. The square was still deserted. But they’d been there. That much was clear from the very atmosphere, from the feeling of recently emptied space. It was also obvious from the scraps of paper lying in gutters, which hadn’t been there before. I squatted to pick one or two of the sodden pieces up. They were from the pamphlet, as I might have expected. Yogsogo... one fragment said.... thulu mw’yleh iä... read another. Late, far too late, I wondered if it all meant something, if it was something more than a local idiosyncrasy or the result of a blind typist. I don’t think I can be blamed for not suspecting that earlier. All I’d wanted was a weekend out of London. I wasn’t expecting anything else.

Looking back up through the slanting rain I noticed something. From where I was it looked as if the door to the pub was now open. I got up and walked towards it, taking occasional paranoid glances into the darkness at the other corners of the square.

No light was showing, but the door was open. The publican had left his pub. The landlady had abandoned her guest house. Were these people so trusting, or did they simply not care? My face in an unconscious wince of tension, I carefully pushed the door open a little farther. No sound came from the room, and when I poked my head cautiously within I saw it was completely empty. I stepped in. The room looked much as it had when I’d last been there, except at the bar. The flap which allowed access to the bar area had been lifted up and left that way, and the door behind was also open. I walked over and, wishing I had a God or religion to invoke, stepped behind the bar.

The first thing I did was to peer into the gloom of the second room, the one you could just see when standing at the bar. I couldn’t see much except chairs, all of the unusual shape. Then I turned and looked through the other door. The wall beyond was panelled with dark wood, and the narrow corridor it formed a part of stopped just past the door. I stepped through and looked to the left. Stone steps led down into darkness. I felt around for a light but couldn’t find one. Even if I had I doubt I would have had the courage to use it.

I thought for a moment before starting down. I wondered about running back to the guest house, checking if Susan had returned. Perhaps the Festival had ended, and she was waiting impatiently in the sitting room, wondering where I was.

I don’t know why I didn’t believe that was the way things were. I simply didn’t, and I went down the steps instead.

There were a good number of them, and they went straight down. It was pitch dark almost from the top, and I walked down with a hand braced against the walls on each side of me. My head was still hurting, indeed it seemed to be getting worse. When I shut my eyes it felt almost as if a small light were beginning to glow in my temple, so I kept them open, little difference though it made to my progress.

Eventually I ran into a wall, and turned left. I walked a little way down another corridor and then realised that I could see a slightly lighter patch in front of me, and hear the sound of distant waves. Not only that.

I could hear piping, and I started to run.

Of course, I thought, as I panted my way towards the end, of course the procession would end on the beach. And of course, perhaps, it would go there by way of a pub that had been called The Aldwinkle, a pub whose name celebrated the night they’d found their chance to emerge. Susan had been right. The name wasn’t simply a souvenir of a bygone event. It meant something to the village, as did the wreck itself, along with R’yleh and everything else. It meant something horrible, celebrated a disastrous opportunity which had been taken advantage of. The piping grew stronger as I approached the end of the tunnel, and when I emerged breathless onto the beach I saw them.

They were walking in pairs, slowly and in a peculiar rhythm. In the middle of the column a model of a boat bobbed and swayed, held up by a multitude of hands. Soon it would have a chance to see if it could float, because they were walking into the sea.

As I watched, rooted to the spot, the figures at the front of the procession took their first steps into the choppy waters. They did so confidently, without any fear, and I thought finally I understood. I lurched forward without thinking, shouting Susan’s name. The column was a long way away, maybe two hundred yards or more across the mud, but I shouted very loudly, and I thought I saw a figure at the back of the procession turn. It was too dark to even be sure that it happened, but I think it did. I think she turned and looked.

I broke into a run and got maybe five yards before something crashed into the side of my head. As my vision faded to black I thought I saw the thing that had been hiding look at me to check I was done, before shambling quickly to join the others.

***

I came back to London two days later, and I’m still here. For the time being. All of Susan’s stuff is in boxes under the stairs. Having it lying around was too painful, but I can’t get rid of it. Not until I know what I’m going to do.

I regained consciousness, after about three hours stretched on my face in the mud, to find the beach completely deserted. I started to stumble towards the water, mind still programmed as it had been before I was knocked out, but then I changed my mind. I walked crying back up the slope and called the police from a public phone booth, and then I slumped down to the ground and passed out. I was taken to hospital eventually, where they found two concussions. But before that I talked to the police, and told them what I knew. I ranted a great deal apparently, about a coastal town where they didn’t eat the fish, about the meaning of inverted swastikas, and about monstrous villagers who could disguise their true nature and look like normal people.

In the end the police brought the heavy squad in. They had to. An empty village where doors have been left open and belongings abandoned is more than local plod can handle. The city cops weren’t terribly interested in my ramblings, and I can’t say that I blame them. But before they arrived I thought one of the local police, an old sergeant who lived in a nearby village, took what I said very seriously.

He must have done. Because on the following day, as I sat shivering in the sitting room of the empty guest house, I saw police divers head out towards the sea. No one knows about this, and they won’t. The press never got wind of the story, and various powers will make sure they never do. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s better that no one knows. The only question in my mind is what I should do, whether I can forget enough not to act on my knowledge. Time will tell.

I brought my shoes back to London in the end, which was a gesture of a kind. The police found them on the front, and I identified them as mine. Deep in one toe I found a note. Goodbye, my dear, it said.

That she went with them I know, and I’m glad she lost her fear of the sea. Perhaps it had never been real fear, but a denial of something else. When I remember the last hour we spent together I wonder now whether it was a tear I felt on my cheek, or whether her hair was wet. Because when the divers returned they’d made a discovery, something that will never be known. More divers arrived an hour later, and for the next day the beach was crawling with them as they returned to the water again and again.

They found the Aldwinkle, and something inside. The skeletons of three hundred and ten people, to be precise. By the jewellery around her neck and the remains of her passport, one was identified as Geraldine Stanbury.

DAGON’S BELL

by BRIAN LUMLEY

I: DEEP KELP

It strikes me as funny sometimes how scraps of information— fragments of seemingly dissociated fact and half-seen or -felt fancies and intuitions, bits of local legend and immemorial myth— can suddenly connect and expand until the total is far greater than the sum of the parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps not necessarily funny... odd.

Flotsam left high and dry by the tide, scurf of the rolling sea; a half-obliterated figure glimpsed on an ancient, well-rubbed coin through the glass of a museum’s showcase; old-wives tales of hauntings and hoary nights, and the ringing of some sepulchral, sunken bell at the rising of the tide; the strange speculations of sea-coal gatherers supping their ale in old north-east pubs, where the sound of the ocean’s wash is never far distant beyond smoke-yellowed bull’s-eye window panes. Items like that, apparently unconnected.

But in the end there was really much more to it than that. For these things were only the pieces of the puzzle; the picture, complete, was far vaster than its component parts. Indeed cosmic...

***

I long ago promised myself that I would never again speak or even think of David Parker and the occurrences of that night at Kettlethorpe Farm (which formed, in any case, a tale almost too grotesque for belief); but now, these years later... well, my promise seems rather redundant. On the other hand it is possible that a valuable warning lies inherent in what I have to say, for which reason, despite the unlikely circumstance that I shall be taken at all seriously, I now put pen to paper.

My name is William Trafford (“Bill”), which hardly matters, but I had known David Parker at school—a Secondary Modern in a colliery village by the sea—before he passed his college examinations, and I was the one who would later share with him Kettlethorpe’s terrible secret.

In fact I had known David well: the son of a miner, he was never typical of his colliery contemporaries but gentle in his ways and lacking the coarseness of the locality and its guttural accents. That is not to belittle the north-easterner in general (after all, I became one myself!) for in all truth they are the salt of the earth; but the nature of their work, and what that work has gradually made of their environment, has moulded them into a hard and clannish lot. David Parker, by his nature, was not of that clan, that is all; and neither was I at that time.

My parents were Yorkshire born and bred, only moving to Harden in County Durham when my father bought a newsagent’s shop there. Hence the friendship that sprang up between us, born not so much out of straightforward compatibility as of the fact that we both felt outsiders. A friendship which lasted for five years from a time when we were both eight years of age, and which was only rejoined upon David’s release from his studies in London twelve years later. That was in 1951.

Meanwhile, in the years flown between...

My father was now dead and my mother more or less confined, and I had expanded the business to two more shops in Hartlepool, both of them under steady and industrious managers, and several smaller but growing concerns much removed from the sale of magazines and newspapers in the local colliery villages. Thus my time was mainly taken up with business matters, but in the highest capacity, which hardly consisted of back-breaking work. What time remained I was pleased to spend, on those occasions when he was available, in the company of my old school friend.

And he too had done well, and would do even better. His studies had been in architecture and design, but within two short years of his return he expanded these spheres to include interior decoration and landscape gardening, setting up a profitable business of his own and building himself an enviable reputation in his fields.

And so it can be seen that the war had been kind to both of us. Too young to have been involved, we had made capital while the world was fighting; now while the world licked its wounds and rediscovered its directions, we were already on course and beginning to ride the crest. Mercenary? No, for we had been mere boys when the war started and were little more than boys when it ended.

But now, eight years later...

We were, or saw ourselves as being, very nearly sophisticates in a mainly unsophisticated society—that is to say part of a very narrow spectrum—and so once more felt drawn together. Even so, we made odd companions. At least externally, superficially. Oh, I suppose our characters, drives and ambitions were similar, but physically we were poles apart. David was dark, handsome and well-proportioned; I was sort of dumpy, sandy, pale to the point of anaemic. I was not unhealthy, but set beside David Parker I certainly looked it!

On the day in question, that is to say the day when the first unconnected fragment presented itself—a Friday in September ’53, it was, just a few days before the Feast of the Exaltation, sometimes called Roodmas in those parts, and occasionally by a far older name— we met in a bar overlooking the sea on old Hartlepool’s headland. On those occasions when we got together like this we would normally try to keep business out of the conversation, but there were times when it seemed to intrude almost of necessity. This was one such.

I had not noticed Jackie Foster standing at the bar upon entering, but certainly he had seen me. Foster was a foreman with a small fleet of sea-coal gathering trucks of which I was co-owner, and he should not have been there in the pub at that time but out and about his work. Possibly he considered it prudent to come over and explain his presence, just in case I had seen him, and he did so in a single word.

“Kelp?” David repeated, looking puzzled; so that I felt compelled to explain.

“Seaweed,” I said. “Following a bad blow, it comes up on the beach in thick drifts. But—” and I looked at Foster pointedly, “—I’ve never before known it to stop the sea-coalers.”

The man shuffled uncomfortably for a moment, took off his cap and scratched his head. “Oh, once or twice ah’ve known it almost this bad, but before your time in the game. It slimes up the rocks an’ the wheels of the lorries slip in the stuff. Bloody arful! An’ stinks like death. It’s lyin’ feet thick on arl the beaches from here to Sunderland!”

“Kelp,” David said again, thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the weed people used to gather up and cook into a soup?”

Foster wrinkled his nose. “Hungry folks’ll eat just about owt, ah suppose, Mr. Parker—but they’d not eat this muck. We carl it ‘deep kelp’. It’s not unusual this time of year—Roodmas time or thereabouts—and generally hangs about for a week or so until the tides clear it or it rots away.”

David continued to look interested and Foster continued: “Funny stuff. Ah mean, you’ll not find it in any book of seaweeds—not that ah’ve ever seen. As a lad ah was daft on nature an’ arl. Collected birds’ eggs, took spore prints of mushrooms an’ toadstools, pressed leaves an’ flowers in books—arl that daft stuff—but in arl the books ah read ah never did find a mention of deep kelp.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, boss, there’s enough of the stuff on the beach ta keep the lorries off. It’s not that they canna get onto the sands, but when they do they canna see the coal for weed. So ah’ve sent the lorries south ta Seaton Carew. The beach is pretty clear down there, ah’m told. Not much coal, but better than nowt.”

My friend and I had almost finished eating by then. As Foster made to leave, I suggested to David: “Let’s finish our drinks, climb down the old sea wall and have a look.”

“Right!” David agreed at once. “I’m curious about this stuff.”

Foster had heard and he turned back to us, shaking his head concernedly. “It’s up ta you, gents,” he said, “but you won’t like it. Stinks, man! Arful! There’s kids who play on the beach arl the livelong day, but you’ll not find them there now. Just the bloody weed, lyin’ there an’ turnin’ ta rot!”

II: A WEDDING AND A WARNING

In any event, we went to see for ourselves, and if I had doubted Foster then I had wronged him. The stuff was awful, and it did stink. I had seen it before, always at this time of year, but never in such quantities. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, however, and that probably explained it. To my mind, anyway. David’s mind was a fraction more inquiring.

“Deep kelp,” he murmured, standing on the weed-strewn rocks, his hair blowing in a salty, stenchy breeze off the sea. “I don’t see it at all.”

“What don’t you see?”

“Well, if this stuff comes from the deeps—I mean from really deep down—surely it would take a real upheaval to drive it onto the beaches like this. Why, there must be thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff. All the way from here to Sunderland? Twenty miles of it?”

I shrugged. “It’ll clear, just like Foster said. A day or two, that’s all. And he’s right: with this stuff lying so thick, you can’t see the streaks of coal.”

“How about the coal?” he said, his mind again grasping after knowledge. “I mean, where does it come from?”

“Same place as the weed,” I answered, “most of it. Come and see.” I crossed to a narrow strip of sand between waves of deep kelp. There I found and picked up a pair of blocky, fist-sized lumps of ocean-rounded rock. Knocking them together, I broke off fragments. Inside, one rock showed a greyish-brown uniformity; the other was black and shiny, finely layered, pure coal.

“I wouldn’t have known the difference,” David admitted.

“Neither would I!” I grinned. “But the sea-coalers rarely err. They say there’s an open seam way out there,” I nodded toward the open sea. “Not unlikely, seeing as how this entire county is riddled with rich mines. Myself, I believe a lot of the coal simply gets washed out of the tippings, the stony debris rejected at the screens. Coal is light and easily washed ashore. The stones are heavy and roll out— downhill, as it were—into deeper water.”

“In that case it seems a pity,” said David, “—that the coal can’t be gathered, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“Why, yes. Surely, if there is an open seam in the sea, the coal would get washed ashore with the kelp. Underneath this stuff, there’s probably tons of it just waiting to be shovelled up!”

I frowned and answered: “You could well be right...” But then I shrugged. “Ah, well, not to worry. It’ll still be there after the weed has gone.” And I winked at him. “Coal doesn’t rot, you see.”

He wasn’t listening but kneeling, lifting a rope of the offensive stuff in his hands. It was heavy, leprous white in the stem or body, deep dark green in the leaf. Hybrid, the flesh of the stuff was—well, fleshy— more animal than vegetable. Bladders were present everywhere, large as a man’s thumbs. David popped one and gave a disgusted grunt, then came to his feet. “God!” he exclaimed, holding his nose. And again: “God!”

I laughed and we picked our way back to the steps in the old sea wall.

And that was that: a fragment, an incident unconnected with anything much. An item of little real interest. One of Nature’s periodic quirks, affecting nothing a great deal. Apparently...

***

It seemed not long after the time of the deep kelp that David got tied up with his wedding plans. I had known, of course, that he had a girl—June Anderson, a solicitor’s daughter from Sunderland, which boasts the prettiest girls in all the land—for I had met her and found her utterly charming; but I had not realised that things were so advanced.

I say it did not seem a long time, and now looking back I see that the period was indeed quite short—the very next summer. Perhaps the span of time was foreshortened even more for me by the suddenness with which their plans culminated. For all was brought dramatically forward by the curious and unexpected vacancy of Kettlethorpe Farm, an extensive property on the edge of Kettlethorpe Dene.

No longer a farm proper but a forlorn relic of another age, the great stone house and its outbuildings were badly in need of repair; but in David’s eyes the place had an Olde Worlde magic all its own, and with his expertise he knew that he could soon convert it into a modern home of great beauty and value. And the place was going remarkably cheap.

As to the farm’s previous tenant: here something peculiar. And here too the second link in my seemingly unconnected chain of occurrences and circumstances.

Old Jason Carpenter had not been well liked in the locality, in fact not at all. Grey-bearded, taciturn, cold and reclusive—with eyes grey as the rolling North Sea and never a smile for man or beast—he had occupied Kettlethorpe Farm for close on thirty years. Never a wife, a manservant or maid, not even a neighbour had entered the place on old Jason’s invitation. No one strayed onto the grounds for fear of Jason’s dog and shotgun; even tradesmen were wary on those rare occasions when they must make deliveries.

But Carpenter had liked his beer and rum chaser, and twice a week would visit The Trust Hotel in Harden. There he had used to sit in the smokeroom and linger over his tipple, his dog Bones alert under the table and between his master’s feet. And customers had used to fear Bones a little, but not as much as the dog feared his master.

And now Jason Carpenter was gone. Note that I do not say dead, simply gone, disappeared. There was no evidence to support any other conclusion—not at that time. It had happened like this:

Over a period of several months various tradesmen had reported Jason’s absence from Kettlethorpe, and eventually, because his customary seat at The Trust had been vacant over that same period, members of the local police went to the farm and forced entry into the main building. No trace had been found of the old hermit, but the police had come away instead with certain documents—chiefly a will, of sorts—which had evidently been left pending just such a search or investigation.

In the documents the recluse had directed that in the event of his “termination of occupancy,” the house, attendant buildings and grounds “be allowed to relapse into the dirt and decay from which they sprang”; but since it was later shown that he was in considerable debt, the property had been put up for sale to settle his various accounts. The house had in fact been under threat of the bailiffs.

All of this, of course, had taken some considerable time, during which a thorough search of the rambling house, its outbuildings and grounds had been made for obvious reasons. But to no avail.

Jason Carpenter was gone. He had not been known to have relatives; indeed, very little had been known of him at all; it was almost as if he had never been. And to many of the people of Harden, that made for a most satisfactory epitaph.

One other note: it would seem that his “termination of occupancy” had come about during the Roodmas time of the deep kelp...

***

And so to the wedding of David Parker and June Anderson, a sparkling affair held at the Catholic Church in Harden, where not even the drab, near-distant background of the colliery’s chimneys and cooling towers should have been able to dampen the gaiety and excitement of the moment. And yet even here, in the steep, crowd-packed streets outside the church, a note of discord. Just one, but one too many.

For as the cheering commenced and the couple left the church to be showered with confetti and jostled to their car, I overheard as if they were spoken directly into my ear—or uttered especially for my notice—the words of a crone in shawl and pinafore, come out of her smoke-grimed miner’s terraced house to shake her head and mutter:

“Aye, an’ he’ll take that bonnie lass ta Kettlethorpe, will he? Arl the bells are ringin’ now, it’s true, but what about the other bell, eh? It’s only rung once or twice arl these lang years—since old Jason had the house—but now there’s word it’s ringin’ again, when nights are dark an’ the sea has a swell ta it.”

I heard it as clearly as that, for I was one of the spectators.

I would have been more closely linked with the celebrations but had expected to be busy, and only by the skin of my teeth managed to be there at all. But when I heard the guttural imprecation of the old lady I turned to seek her out, even caught a glimpse of her, before being engulfed by a horde of Harden urchins leaping for a handful of hurled pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences as the newlyweds’ car drove off.

By which time summer thunderclouds had gathered, breaking at the command of a distant flash of lightning, and rain had begun to pelt down. Which served to put an end to the matter. The crowd rapidly dispersed and I headed for shelter.

But... I would have liked to know what the old woman had meant...

III: GHOST STORY

“Haunted?” I echoed David’s words.

I had bumped into him at the library in Hartlepool some three weeks after his wedding. A voracious reader, an “addict” for hard-boiled detective novels, I had been on my way in as he was coming out.

“Haunted, yes!” he repeated, his voice half-amused, half-excited. “The old farm—haunted!”

The alarm his words conjured in me was almost immediately relieved by his grin and wide-awake expression. Whatever ghosts they were at the farm, he obviously didn’t fear them. Was he having a little joke at my expense? I grinned with him, saying: “Well, I shouldn’t care to have been your ghosts. Not for the last thirty years, at any rate. Not with old man Carpenter about the place. That would be a classic case of the biter bit!”

“Old Jason Carpenter,” he reminded me, smiling still but less brilliantly, “has disappeared, remember?”

“Oh!” I said, feeling a little foolish. “Of course he has.” And I followed up quickly with: “But what do you mean, haunted?”

“Local village legend,” he shrugged. “I heard it from Father Nicholls, who married us. He had it from the priest before him, and so on. Handed down for centuries, so to speak. I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t stopped me and asked how we were getting on up at the farm. If we’d seen anything—you know—odd? He wouldn’t have said anything more but I pressed him.”

“And?”

“Well, it seems the original owners were something of a fishy bunch.”

“Fishy?”

“Quite literally! I mean, they looked fishy. Or maybe froggy? Protuberant lips, wide-mouthed, scaly-skinned, popeyed—you name it. To use Father Nicholls’ own expression, ‘ichthyic’.”

“Slow down,” I told him, seeing his excitement rising up again. “First of all, what do you mean by the ‘original’ owners? The people who built the place?”

“Good heavens, no!” he chuckled; and then he took me by the elbow and guided me into the library and to a table. We sat. “No one knows—no one can remember—who actually built the place. If ever there were records, well, they’re long lost. God, it probably dates back to Roman times! It’s likely as old as the Wall itself—even older. Certainly it has been a landmark on maps for the last four hundred and fifty years. No, I mean the first recorded family to live there. Which was something like two-and-a-half centuries ago.

“And they were—” I couldn’t help frowning, “—odd-looking, these people?”

“Right! And odd not only in their looks. That was probably just a case of regressive genes, the result of indiscriminate in-breeding. Anyway, the locals shunned them—not that there were any real ‘locals’ in those days, you understand. I mean, the closest villages or towns then were Hartlepool, Sunderland, Durham and Seaham Harbour. Maybe a handful of other, smaller places—I haven’t checked. But this country was wild! And it stayed that way, more or less, until the modern roads were built. Then came the railways, to service the pits, and so on.”

I nodded, becoming involved with David’s enthusiasm, finding myself carried along by it. “And the people at the farm stayed there down the generations?”

“Not quite,” he answered. “Apparently there was something of a hiatus in their tenancy around a hundred and fifty years ago; but later, about the time of the American Civil War, a family came over from Innsmouth in New England and bought the place up. They, too, had the degenerate looks of earlier tenants; might even have been an offshoot of the same family, returning to their ancestral home, as it were. They made a living farming and fishing. Fairly industrious, it would seem, but surly and clannish. Name of Waite. By then, though, the ‘ghosts’ were well-established in local folklore. They came in two manifestations, apparently.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “One of them was a gigantic, wraithlike, nebulous figure rising from the mists over Kettlethorpe Dene, seen by travellers on the old coach road or by fishermen returning to Harden along the cliff-top paths. But the interesting thing is this: if you look at a map of the district, as I’ve done, you’ll see that the farm lies in something of a depression directly between the coach road and the cliffs. Anything seen from those vantage points could conceivably be emanating from the farm itself.”

I was again beginning to find the nature of David’s discourse disturbing. Or if not what he was saying, his obvious involvement with the concept. “You seem to have gone over all of this rather thoroughly,” I remarked. “Any special reason?”

“Just my old thirst for knowledge,” he grinned. “You know I’m never happy unless I’m tracking something down—and never happier than when I’ve finally got it cornered. And after all, I do live at the place! Anyway, about the giant mist-figure: according to the legends, it was half-fish, half-man!”

“A merman?”

“Yes. And now—” he triumphantly took out a folded sheet of rubbing parchment and opened it out onto the table. “Ta-rah! And what do you make of that?”

The impression on the paper was perhaps nine inches square; a charcoal rubbing taken from a brass of some sort, I correctly imagined. It showed a mainly anthropomorphic male figure seated upon a rock-carved chair or throne, his lower half obscured by draperies of weed bearing striking resemblance to the deep kelp. The eyes of the figure were large and somewhat protuberant; his forehead sloped; his skin had the overlapping scales of a fish, and the fingers of his one visible hand where it grasped a short trident were webbed. The background was vague, reminding me of nothing so much as cyclopean submarine ruins.

“Neptune,” I said. “Or at any rate, a merman. Where did you get it?”

“I rubbed it up myself,” he said, carefully folding the sheet and replacing it in his pocket. “It’s from a plate on a lintel over a door in one of the outbuildings at Kettlethorpe.” And then for the first time he frowned. “Fishy people and a fishy symbol...”

He stared at me strangely for a moment and I felt a sudden chill in my bones—until his grin came back and he added: “And an entirely fishy story, eh?”

We left the library and I walked with him to his car. “And what’s your real interest in all of this?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you as much of a folklorist?”

His look this time was curious, almost evasive. “You just won’t believe that it’s only this old inquiring mind of mine, will you?” But then his grin came back, bright and infectious as ever.

He got into his car, wound down the window and poked his head out. “Will we be seeing you soon? Isn’t it time you paid us a visit?”

“Is that an invitation?”

He started up the car. “Of course—any time.”

“Then I’ll make it soon,” I promised.

“Sooner!” he said.

Then I remembered something he had said. “David, you mentioned two manifestations of this—this ghostliness. What was the other one?”

“Eh?” he frowned at me, winding up his window. Then he stopped winding. “Oh, that. The bell, you mean...”

“Bell?” I echoed him, the skin of my neck suddenly tingling. “What bell?”

“A ghost bell!” he yelled as he pulled away from the kerb. “What else? It tolls underground or under the sea, usually when there’s a mist or a swell on the ocean. I keep listening for it, but—”

“No luck?” I asked automatically, hearing my own voice almost as that of a stranger.

“Not yet.”

And as he grinned one last time and waved a farewell, pulling away down the street, against all commonsense and logic I found myself remembering the old woman’s words outside the church: “What about the other bell, eh?”

What about the other bell, indeed...

IV: “MIASMA”

Halfway back to Harden it dawned on me that I had not chosen a book for myself. My mind was still full of David Parker’s discoveries; about which, where he had displayed that curious excitement, I still experienced only a niggling disquiet.

But back at Harden, where my home stands on a hill at the southern extreme of the village, I remembered where once before I had seen something like the figure on David’s rubbing. And sure enough it was there in my antique, illustrated two-volume Family Bible; pages I had not looked into for many a year, which had become merely ornamental on my bookshelves.

The item I refer to was simply one of the many small illustrations in Judges XIII: a drawing of a piscine deity on a Philistine coin or medallion. Dagon, whose temple Samson toppled at Gaza.

Dagon...

With my memory awakened, it suddenly came to me where I had seen one other representation of this same god. Sunderland has a fine museum and my father had often taken me there when I was small. Amongst the museum’s collection of coins and medals I had seen...

“Dagon?” the curator answered my telephone inquiry with interest. “No, I’m afraid we have very little of the Philistines; no coins that I know of. Possibly it was a little later than that. Can I call you back?”

“Please do, and I’m sorry to be taking up your time like this.”

“Not at all, a pleasure. That’s what we’re here for.”

And ten minutes later he was back. “As I suspected, Mr. Trafford. We do have that coin you remembered, but it’s Phoenician, not Philistine. The Phoenicians adopted Dagon from the Philistines and called him Oannes. That’s a pattern that repeats all through history. The Romans in particular were great thieves of other people’s gods. Sometimes they adopted them openly, as with Zeus becoming Jupiter, but at other times—where the deity was especially dark or ominous, as in Summanus—they were rather more covert in their worship. Great cultists, the Romans. You’d be surprised how many secret societies and cults came down the ages from sources such as these. But... there I go again... lecturing!”

“Not at all,” I assured him, “that’s all very interesting. And thank you very much for your time.”

“And is that it? There’s no other way in which I can assist?”

“No, that’s it. Thank you again.”

And indeed that seemed to be that...

I went to see them a fortnight later. Old Jason Carpenter had not had a telephone, and David was still in the process of having one installed, which meant that I must literally drop in on them.

Kettlethorpe lies to the north of Harden, between the modern coast road and the sea, and the view of the dene as the track dipped down from the road and wound toward the old farm was breathtaking. Under a blue sky, with seagulls wheeling and crying over a distant, fresh-ploughed field, and the hedgerows thick with honeysuckle and the droning of bees, and sweet smells of decay from the streams and hazelnut-shaded pools, the scene was very nearly idyllic. A far cry from midnight tales of ghouls and ghosties!

Then to the farm’s stone outer wall—almost a fortification, reminiscent of some forbidding feudal structure—which encompassed all of the buildings including the main house. Iron gates were open, bearing the legend KETTLETHORPE in stark letters of iron. Inside... things already were changing.

The wall surrounded something like three-and-a-half to four acres of ground, being the actual core of the property. I had seen several rotting PRIVATE PROPERTY AND TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED notices along the road, defining Kettlethorpe’s exterior boundaries, but the area bordered by the wall was the very heart of the place.

In layout: there was a sort of geometrical regularity to the spacing and positioning of the buildings. They formed a horseshoe, with the main house at its apex; the open mouth of the horseshoe faced the sea, unseen, something like a mile away beyond a rise which boasted a dense-grown stand of oaks. All of the buildings were of local stone, easily recognisable through its tough, flinty-grey texture. I am no geologist and so could not give that stone a name, but I knew that in years past it had been blasted from local quarries or cut from outcrops. To my knowledge, however, the closest of these sources was a good many miles away; the actual building of Kettlethorpe must therefore have been a Herculean task.

As this thought crossed my mind, and remembering the words of the curator of Sunderland’s museum, I had to smile. Perhaps not Herculean but something later than the Greeks. Except that I couldn’t recall a specific Roman strong-man!

And approaching the house, where I pulled up before the stone columns of its portico, I believed I could see where David had got his idea of the age of the place. Under the heat of the sun the house was redolent of the centuries; its walls massive, structurally Romanesque. The roof especially, low-peaked and broad, giving an impression of strength and endurance.

What with its outer wall and horseshoe design, the place might well be some strange old Roman temple. A temple, yes, but wavery for all its massiveness, shimmering as smoke and heat from a small bonfire in what had been a garden drifted lazily across my field of vision. A temple—ah!—but to what strange old god?

And no need to ponder the source of that thought, for certainly the business of David’s antiquarian research was still in my head; and while I had no intention of bringing that subject up, still I wondered how far he had progressed. Or perhaps by now he had discovered sufficient of Kettlethorpe to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps, but I doubted it. No, he would follow the very Devil to Hell, that one, in pursuit of knowledge.

“Hello, there!” he slapped me on the back, causing me to start as I got out of my old Morris and closed its door. I started... reeled...

...He had come out of the shadows of the porch so quickly... I had not seen him... My eyes... the heat and the glaring sun and the drone of bees...

“Bill!” David’s voice came to me from a million miles away, full of concern. “What on earth...?”

“I’ve come over queer,” I heard myself say, leaning on my car as the world rocked about me.

“Queer? Man, you’re pale as death! It’s the bloody sun! Too hot by far. And the smoke from the fire. And I’ll bet you’ve been driving with your windows up. Here, let’s get you into the house.”

Hanging onto his broad shoulder, I was happy to let him lead me staggering indoors. “The hot sun,” he mumbled again, half to me, half to himself. “And the honeysuckle. Almost a miasma. Nauseating, until you get used to it. June has suffered in exactly the same way.”

V: THE ENCLOSURE

“Miasma?” I let myself fall into a cool, shady window seat.

He nodded, swimming into focus as I quickly recovered from my attack of—of whatever it had been. “Yes, a mist of pollen, invisible, born on thermals in the air, sweet and cloying. Enough to choke a horse!”

“Is that what it was? God!—I thought I was going to faint.”

“I know what you mean. June has been like it for a week. Conks out completely at high noon. Even inside it’s too close for her liking. She gets listless. She’s upstairs now, stretched out flat!”

As if the very mention of her name were a summons, June’s voice came down to us: “David, is that Bill? I’ll be down at once.”

“Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” I called out, my voice still a little shaky. “And certainly not if you don’t feel too well.”

“I’m fine!” her voice insisted. “I was just a little tired, that’s all.”

I was myself again, gratefully accepting a scotch and soda, swilling a parched dryness from my mouth and throat.

“There,” said David, seeming to read my thoughts. “You look more your old self now.”

“First time that ever happened to me,” I told him. “I suppose your ‘miasma’ theory must be correct. Anyway, I’ll be up on my feet again in a minute.” As I spoke I let my eyes wander about the interior of what would be the house’s main living room.

The room was large, for the main part oak-panelled, almost stripped of its old furniture and looking extremely austere. I recalled the bonfire, its pale flames licking at the upthrusting, worm-eaten leg of a chair...

One wall was of the original hard stone, polished by the years, creating an effect normally thought desirable in modern homes but perfectly natural here and in no way contrived. All in all a charming room. Ages-blackened beams bowed almost imperceptibly toward the centre where they crossed the low ceiling wall to wall.

“Built to last,” said David. “Three hundred years old at least, those beams, but the basic structure is—” he shrugged, “—I’m not sure, not yet. This is one of five lower rooms, all about the same size. I’ve cleared most of them out now, burnt up most of the old furniture; but there were one or two pieces worth renovation. Most of the stuff I’ve saved is in what used to be old man Carpenter’s study. And the place is—will be—beautiful. When I’m through with it. Gloomy at the moment, yes, but that’s because of the windows. I’m afraid most of these old small-panes will have to go. The place needs opening up.”

“Opening up, yes,” I repeated him, sensing a vague irritation or tension in him, a sort of urgency.

“Here,” he said, “are you feeling all right now? I’d like you to see the plate I took that rubbing from.”

“The Dagon plate,” I said at once, biting my tongue a moment too late.

He looked at me, stared at me, and slowly smiled. “So you looked it up, did you? Dagon, yes—or Neptune, as the Romans called him. Come on, I’ll show you.” And as we left the house he yelled back over his shoulder: “June—we’re just going over to the enclosure. Back soon.”

“Enclosure?” I followed him toward the mouth of the horseshoe of buildings. “I thought you said the brass was on a lintel?”

“So it is, over a doorway—but the building has no roof and so I call it an enclosure. See?” and he pointed. The mouth of the horseshoe was formed of a pair of small, rough stone buildings set perhaps twenty-five yards apart, which were identical in design but for the one main discrepancy David had mentioned—namely that the one on the left had no roof.

“Perhaps it fell in?” I suggested as we approached the structure.

David shook his head. “No,” he said, “there never was a roof. Look at the tops of the walls. They’re flush. No gaps to show where roof support beams might have been positioned. If you make a comparison with the other building you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, whatever its original purpose, old man Carpenter filled it with junk: bags of rusty old nails, worn-out tools, that sort of thing. Oh, yes— and he kept his firewood here, under a tarpaulin.”

I glanced inside the place, leaning against the wall and poking my head in through the vacant doorway. The wall stood in its own shadow and was cold to my touch. Beams of sunlight, glancing in over the top of the west wall, filled the place with dust motes that drifted like swarms of aimless microbes in the strangely musty air. There was a mixed smell of rust and rot, of some small dead thing, and of... the sea? The last could only be a passing fancy, no sooner imagined than forgotten.

I shaded my eyes against the dusty sunbeams. Rotted sacks spilled nails and bolts upon a stone-flagged floor; farming implements red with rust were heaped like metal skeletons against one wall; at the back, heavy blocks of wood stuck out from beneath a mould-spotted tarpaulin. A dead rat or squirrel close to my feet seethed with maggots.

I blinked in the hazy light, shuddered—not so much at sight of the small corpse as at a sudden chill of the psyche—and hastily withdrew my head.

“There you are,” said David, his matter-of-fact tone bringing me back down to earth. “The brass.”

Above our heads, central in the stone lintel, a square plate bore the original of David’s rubbing. I gave it a glance, an almost involuntary reaction to David’s invitation that I look, and at once looked away. He frowned, seemed disappointed. “You don’t find it interesting?”

“I find it... disturbing,” I answered at length. “Can we go back to the house? I’m sure June will be up and about by now.”

He shrugged, leading the way as we retraced our steps along sun-splashed, weed-grown paths between scrubby fruit trees and dusty, cobwebbed shrubbery. “I thought you’d be taken by it,” he said. And, “How do you mean, ‘disturbing’?”

I shook my head, had no answer for him. “Maybe it’s just me,” I finally said. “I don’t feel at my best today. I’m not up to it, that’s all.”

“Not up to what?” he asked sharply, then shrugged again before I could answer. “Suit yourself.” But after that he quickly became distant and a little surly. He wasn’t normally a moody man, but I knew him well enough to realise that I had touched upon some previously unsuspected, exposed nerve; and so I determined not to prolong my visit.

I did stay long enough to talk to June, however, though what I saw of her was hardly reassuring. She looked pinched, her face lined and pale, showing none of the rosiness one might expect in a newlywed, or in any healthy young woman in summertime. Her eyes were red-rimmed, their natural blue seeming very much watered-down; her skin looked dry, deprived of moisture; even her hair, glossy-black and bouncy on those previous occasions when we had met, seemed lacklustre now and disinterested.

It could be, of course, simply the fact that I had caught her at a bad time. Her father had died recently, as I later discovered, and of course that must still be affecting her. Also, she must have been working very hard, alongside David, trying to get the old place put to rights. Or again it could be David’s summer “miasma”—an allergy, perhaps.

Perhaps...

But why any of these things—David’s preoccupation, his near-obsession (or mine?) with occurrences and relics of the distant past; the old myths and legends of the region, of hauntings and misty phantoms and such; and June’s queer malaise—why any of these things should concern me beyond the bounds of common friendship I did not know, could not say. I only knew that I felt as if somewhere a great wheel had started to roll, and that my friend and his wife lay directly in its path, not even knowing that it bore down upon them...

VI: DAGON’S BELL

Summer rolled by in warm lazy waves; autumn saw the trees shamelessly, mindlessly stripping themselves naked (one would think they’d keep their leaves to warm them through the winter); my businesses presented periodic problems enough to keep my nose to the grindstone, and so there was little spare time in which to ponder the strangeness of the last twelve months. I saw David in the village now and then, usually at a distance; saw June, too, but much less frequently. More often than not he seemed haggard—or if not haggard, hagridden, nervous, agitated, hurried—and she was... well, spectral. Pale and willow-slim, and red-eyed (I suspected) behind dark spectacles. Married life? Or perhaps some other problem? None of my business.

Then came the time of the deep kelp once more, which was when David made it my business.

And here I must ask the reader to bear with me. The following part of the story will seem hastily written, too thoughtlessly prepared and put together. But this is how I remember it: blurred and unreal, and patterned with mismatched dialogue. It happened quickly; I see no reason to spin it out...

***

David’s knock was urgent on a night when the sky was black with falling rain and the wind whipped the trees to a frenzy; and yet he stood there in shirt-sleeves, shivering, gaunt in aspect and almost vacant in expression. It took several brandies and a thorough rub-down with a warm towel to bring him to a semblance of his old self, by which time he seemed more ashamed of his behaviour than eager to explain it. But I was not letting him off that lightly. The time had come, I decided, to have the thing out with him; get it out in the open, whatever it was, and see what could be done about it while there was yet time.

“Time?” he finally turned his gaze upon me from beneath his mop of tousled hair, a towel over his shoulders while his shirt steamed before my open fire. “Is there yet time? Damned if I know...” He shook his head.

“Well then, tell me,” I said, exasperated. “Or at least try. Start somewhere. You must have come to me for something. Is it you and June? Was your getting married a mistake? Or is it just the place, the old farm?”

“Oh, come on, Bill!” he snorted. “You know well enough what it is. Something of it, anyway. You experienced it yourself. Just the place?” the corners of his mouth turned down, his expression souring. “Oh, yes, it’s the place, all right. What the place was, what it might be even now...”

“Go on,” I prompted him; and he launched into the following:

“I came to ask you to come back with me. I don’t want to spend another night alone there.”

“Alone? But isn’t June there?”

He looked at me for a moment and finally managed a ghastly grin. “She is and she isn’t,” he said. “Oh, yes, yes, she’s there—but still I’m alone. Not her fault, poor love. It’s that bloody awful place!”

“Tell me about it,” I urged.

He sighed, bit his lip. And after a moment: “I think,” he began, “—I think it was a temple. And I don’t think the Romans had it first. You know, of course, that they’ve found Phoenician symbols on some of the stones at Stonehenge? Well, and what else did the ancients bring with them to old England, eh? What did we worship in those prehistoric times? The earth-mother, the sun, the rain—the sea? We’re an island, Bill. The sea was everywhere around us! And it was bountiful. It still is, but not like it was in those days. What’s more natural than to worship the sea—and what the sea brought?”

“Its bounty?” I said.

“That, yes, and something else. Cthulhu, Pischa, the Kraken, Dagon, Oannes, Neptune. Call him—it—what you will. But it was worshipped at Kettlethorpe, and it still remembers. Yes, and I think it comes, in certain seasons, to seek the worship it once knew and perhaps still... still...”

“Yes?”

He looked quickly away. “I’ve made... discoveries.”

I waited.

“I’ve found things out, yes, yes—and—” His eyes flared up for a moment in the firelight, then dulled.

“And?”

“Damn it!” he turned on me and the towel fell from his shoulders. Quickly he snatched it up and covered himself—but not before I had seen how thin mere months had made him. “Damn it!” he mumbled again, less vehemently now. “Must you repeat everything I say? God, I do enough of that myself! I go over everything—over and over and over...”

I sat in silence, waiting. He would tell it in his own time.

And eventually he continued. “I’ve made discoveries, and I’ve heard... things.” He looked from the fire to me, peered at me, ran trembling fingers through his hair. And did I detect streaks of grey in that once jet mop? “I’ve heard the bell!”

“Then it’s time you got out of there!” I said at once. “Time you got June out, too.”

“I know, I know!” he answered, his expression tortured. He gripped my arm. “But I’m not finished yet. I don’t know it all, not yet. It lures me, Bill. I have to know...”

“Know what?” It was my turn to show my agitation. “What do you need to know, you fool? Isn’t it enough that the place is evil? You know that much. And yet you stay on there. Get out, that’s my advice. Get out now!”

“No!” his denial was emphatic. “I’m not finished. There has to be an end to it. The place must be cleansed.” He stared again into the fire.

“So you do admit it’s evil?”

“Of course it is. Yes, I know it is. But leave, get out? I can’t, and June—”

“Yes?”

“She won’t!” He gave a muffled sob and turned watery, searching eyes full upon me. “The place is like... like a magnet! It has a genius loci. It’s a focal point for God-only-knows-what forces. Evil? Oh, yes! An evil come down all the centuries. But I bought the place and I shall cleanse it—end it forever, whatever it is.”

“Look,” I tried reasoning with him, “let’s go back, now, the two of us. Let’s get June out of there and bring her back here for the night. How did you get here anyway? Surely not on foot, on a night like this?”

“No, no,” he shook his head. “Car broke down halfway up the hill. Rain must have got under the bonnet. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” He stood up, looked suddenly afraid, wild-eyed. “I’ve been away too long. Bill, will you run me back? June’s there—alone! She was sleeping when I left. I can fill you in on the details while you drive...”

VII: MANIFESTATION

I made him take another brandy, threw a coat over his shoulders, bustled him out to my car. Moments later we were rolling down into Harden and he was telling me all that had happened between times. As best I remember, this is what he said:

“Since that day you visited us I’ve been hard at work. Real work, I mean. Not the other thing, not delving—not all of the time, anyway. I got the grounds inside the walls tidied up, even tried a little preliminary landscaping. And the house: the old windows out, new ones in. Plenty of light. But still the place was musty. As the summer turned I began burning old Carpenter’s wood, drying out the house, ridding it of the odour of centuries—a smell that was always thicker at night. And fresh paint, too, lots of it. Mainly white, all bright and new. June picked up a lot; you must have noticed how down she was? Yes, well she seemed to be on the mend. I thought I had the— the ‘miasma’—on the run. Hah!” he gave a bitter snort. “A ‘summer miasma’, I called it. Blind, blind!”

“Go on,” I urged him, driving carefully through the wet streets.

“Eventually, to give myself room to sort out the furniture and so on, I got round to chucking the old shelves and books out of Carpenter’s study. That would have been okay, but... I looked into some of those books. That was an error. I should have simply burned the lot, along with the wormy old chairs and shreds of carpet. And yet, in a way, I’m glad I didn’t.”

I could feel David’s fevered eyes burning me in the car’s dark interior, fixed upon me as he spoke.

“The knowledge in those books, Bill. The dark secrets, the damnable mysteries. You know, if anyone does, what a fool I am for a mystery. I was hooked; work ceased; I had to know! But those books and manuscripts: the Unter-Zee Kulten and Hydrophinnae. Doorfen’s treatise on submarine civilisations and the Johansen Narrative of 1925. A great sheaf of notes purporting to be from American government files for 1928, when federal agents ‘raided’ Innsmouth, a decaying, horror-haunted town on the coast of New England; and other scraps and fragments from all the world’s mythologies, all of them concerned with the worship of a great god of the sea.”

“Innsmouth?” my ears pricked up. I had heard that name mentioned once before. “But isn’t that the place—?”

“—The place which spawned that family, the Waites, who came over and settled at Kettlethorpe about the time of the American Civil War? That’s right,” he nodded an affirmative, stared out into the rain-black night. “And old Carpenter who had the house for thirty years, he came from Innsmouth, too!”

“He was of the same people?”

“No, not him. The very opposite. He was at the farm for the same reason I am—now. Oh, he was strange, reclusive—who wouldn’t be? I’ve read his diaries and I understand. Not everything, for even in his writing he held back, didn’t explain too much. Why should he? His diaries were for him, aids to memory. They weren’t meant for others to understand, but I fathomed a lot of it. The rest was in those government files.

“Innsmouth prospered in the time of the clipper ships and the old trade routes. The captains and men of some of those old ships brought back wives from Polynesia—and also their strange rites of worship, their gods. There was queer blood in those native women, and it spread rapidly. As the years passed the entire town became infected. Whole families grew up tainted. They were less than human, amphibian creatures more of the sea than the land. Merfolk, yes! Tritons, who worshipped Dagon in the deeps: ‘Deep Ones’, as old Carpenter called them. Then came the federal raid of ’28. But it came too late for old Carpenter.

“He had a store in Innsmouth, but well away from the secret places—away from the boarded-up streets and houses and churches where the worst of them had their dens and held their meetings and kept their rites. His wife was long dead of some wasting disease, but his daughter was alive and schooling in Arkham. Shortly before the raid she came home, little more than a girl. And she became—I don’t know—lured. It’s a word that sticks in my mind. A very real word, to me.

“Anyway, the Deep Ones took her, gave her to something they called out of the sea. She disappeared. Maybe she was dead, maybe something worse. They’d have killed Carpenter then, because he’d learned too much about them and wanted revenge, but the government raid put an end to any personal reprisals or vendettas. Put an end to Innsmouth, too. Why, they just about wrecked the town! Vast areas of complete demolition. They even depth-charged a reef a mile out in the sea...

“Well, after things quieted down Carpenter stayed on a while in Innsmouth, what was left of it. He was settling his affairs, I suppose, and maybe ensuring that the evil was at an end. Which must have been how he learned that it wasn’t at an end but spreading like some awful blight. And because he suspected the survivors of the raid might seek haven in old strongholds abroad, finally he came to Kettlethorpe.”

“Here?” David’s story was beginning to make connections, was starting to add up. “Why would he come here?”

“Why? Haven’t you been listening? He’d found something out about Kettlethorpe, and he came to make sure the Innsmouth horror couldn’t spread here. Or perhaps he knew it was already here, waiting, like a cancer ready to shoot out its tentacles. Perhaps he came to stop it spreading further. Well, he’s managed that these last thirty years, but now—”

“Yes?”

“Now he’s gone, and I’m the owner of the place. Yes, and I have to see to it that whatever he was doing gets finished!”

“But what was he doing?” I asked. “And at what expense? Gone, you said. Yes, old Carpenter’s gone. But gone where? What will all of this cost you, David? And more important by far, what will it cost June?”

My words had finally stirred something in him, something he had kept suppressed, too frightened of it to look more closely. I could tell by the way he started, sat bolt upright beside me. “June? But—”

“But nothing, man! Look at yourself. Better still, take a good look at your wife. You’re going down the drain, both of you. It’s something that started the day you took that farm. I’m sure you’re right about the place, about old Carpenter, all that stuff you’ve dredged up—but now you’ve got to forget it. Sell Kettlethorpe, that’s my advice—or better still raze it to the ground! But whatever you do—”

“Look!” he started again and gripped my arm in a suddenly claw-hard hand.

I looked, applied my brakes, brought the car skidding to a halt in the rain-puddled track. We had turned off the main road by then, where the track winds down to the farm. The rain had let up and the air had gone still as a shroud. Shroudlike, too, the milky mist that lay silently upon the near-distant dene and lapped a foot deep about the old farm’s stony walls. The scene was weird under a watery moon—but weirder by far the morbid manifestation which was even now rising up like a wraith over the farm.

A shape, yes—billowing up, composed of mist, writhing huge over the ancient buildings. The shape of some monstrous merman—the ages-evil shape of Dagon himself!

***

I should have shaken David off and driven on at once, of course I should have, down to the farm and whatever waited there; but the sight of that figure mushrooming and firming in the dank night air was paralysing. And sitting there in the car, with the engine slowly ticking over, we shuddered as one as we heard, quite distinctly, the first muffled gonging of some damned and discordant bell. A tolling whose notes might on another occasion be sad and sorrowful, which now were filled with a menace out of the eons.

“The bell!” David’s gasp galvanised me into action.

“I hear it,” I said, throwing the car into gear and racing down that last quarter-mile stretch to the farm. It seemed that time was frozen in those moments, but then we were through the iron gates and slewing to a halt in front of the porch. The house was bright with lights, but June—

While David tore desperately through the rooms of the house, searching upstairs and down, crying her name, I could only stand by the car and tremblingly listen to the tolling of the bell; its dull, sepulchral summons seeming to me to issue from below, from the very earth beneath my feet. And as I listened so I watched that writhing figure of mist shrink down into itself, seeming to glare from bulging eyes of mist one final ray of hatred in my direction, before spiralling down and disappearing—into the shell of that roofless building at the mouth of the horseshoe!

David, awry and babbling as he staggered from the house, saw it too. “There!” he pointed at the square, mist-wreathed building. “That’s where it is. And that’s where she’ll be. I didn’t know she knew... she must have been watching me. Bill—” he clutched at my arm, “—are you with me? Say you are, for God’s sake!” And I could only nod my head.

Hearts racing, we made for that now ghastly edifice of reeking mist—only to recoil a moment later from a figure that reeled out from beneath the lintel with the Dagon plate to fall swooning into David’s arms. June, of course—but how could it be? How could this be June?

Not the June I had known, no, but some other, some revenant of that June...

VIII: “THAT PLACE BELOW...”

She was gaunt, hair coarse as string, skin dry and stretched over features quite literally, shockingly altered into something... different. Strangely, David was not nearly so horrified by what he could see of her by the thin light of the moon; far more so after we had taken her back to the house. For quite apart from what were to me undeniable alterations in her looks in general—about which, as yet, he had made no comment—it then became apparent that his wife had been savaged and brutalised in the worst possible manner.

I remember, as I drove them to the emergency hospital in Hartlepool, listening to David as he cradled her in his arms in the back of the car. She was not conscious, and David barely so (certainly he was oblivious to what he babbled and sobbed over her during that nightmare journey) but my mind was working overtime as I listened to his crooning, utterly distraught voice:

“She must have watched me, poor darling, must have seen me going to that place. At first I went for the firewood—I burned up all of old Jason’s wood—but then, beneath the splinters and bits of bark, I found the millstone over the slab. The old boy had put that stone there to keep the slab down. And it had done its job, by God! Must have weighed all of two hundred and forty pounds. Impossible to shift from those slimy, narrow steps below. But I used a lever to move it, yes—and I lifted the slab and went down. Down those ancient steps—down, down, down. A maze, down there. The earth itself, honeycombed...!

“...What were they for, those burrows? What purpose were they supposed to fulfil? And who dug them? I didn’t know, but I kept it from her anyway—or thought I had. I couldn’t say why, not then, but some instinct warned me not to tell her about... about that place below. I swear to God I meant to close it up forever, choke the mouth of that—that pit!—with concrete. And I’d have done it, I swear it, once I’d explored those tunnels to the full. But that millstone, June, that great heavy stone. How did you shift it? Or were you helped?

“I’ve been down there only two or three times on my own, and I never went very far. Always there was that feeling that I wasn’t alone, that things moved in the darker burrows and watched me where I crept. And that sluggish stream, bubbling blindly through airless fissures to the sea. That stream which rises and falls with the tides. And the kelp all bloated and slimy. Oh, my God! My God...!”

...And so on. But by the time we reached the hospital David had himself more or less under control again. Moreover, he had dragged from me a promise that I would let him—indeed help him—do things his own way. He had a plan which seemed both simple and faultless, one which must conclusively write finis on the entire affair. That was to say if his fears for Kettlethorpe and the conjectural region he termed “that place below” were soundly based.

As to why I so readily went along with him—why I allowed him to brush aside unspoken any protests or objections I might have entertained—quite simply, I had seen that mist-formed shape with my own eyes, and with my own ears had heard the tolling of that buried and blasphemous bell. And for all that the thing seemed fantastic, the conviction was now mine that the farm was a seat of horror and evil as great and maybe greater than any other these British Isles had ever known...

***

We stayed at the hospital through the night, gave identical, falsified statements to the police (an unimaginative tale of a marauder, seen fleeing under cover of the mist toward the dene), and in between sat together in a waiting area drinking coffee and quietly conversing. Quietly now, yes, for David was exhausted both physically and mentally; and much more so after he had attended that examination of his wife made imperative by her condition and by our statements.

As for June: mercifully she stayed in her traumatic state of deepest shock all through the night and well into the morning. Finally, around 10:00 p.m. we were informed that her condition, while still unstable, was no longer critical; and then, since it was very obvious that we could do nothing more, I drove David home with me to Harden.

I bedded him down in my guest-room, by which time all I wanted to do was get to my own bed for an hour or two; but about 4:00 p.m. I was awakened from uneasy dreams to find him on the telephone, his voice stridently urgent. As I went to him he put the phone down, turned to me haggard and red-eyed, his face dark with stubble. “She’s stabilised,” he said, and: “Thank God for that! But she hasn’t come out of shock—not completely. It’s too deep-seated. At least that’s what they told me. They say she could be like it for weeks... maybe longer.”

“What will you do?” I asked him. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course, and—”

“Stay here?” he cut me short. “Yes, I’d like that—afterwards.”

I nodded, biting my lip. “I see. You intend to go through with it. Very well—but there’s still time to tell the police, you know. You could still let them deal with it.”

He uttered a harsh, barking laugh. “Can you really imagine me telling all of this to your average son-of-the-sod Hartlepool bobby? Why, even if I showed them that... the place below, what could they do about it? And should I tell them about my plan, too? What!— mention dynamite to the law, the local authorities? Oh, yes, I can just see that! Even if they didn’t put me in a straightjacket it would still take them an age to get round to doing anything. And meanwhile, if there is something down there under the farm—and Bill, we know there is—what’s to stop it or them moving on to fresh pastures?”

When I had no answer, he continued in a more controlled, quieter tone. “Do you know what old Carpenter was doing? I’ll tell you: he was going down there in the right seasons, when he heard the bell ringing—going down below with his shotgun and blasting all hell out of what he found in those foul black tunnels! Paying them back for what they did to him and his in Innsmouth. A madman who didn’t know what he wrote in those diaries of his? No, for we’ve seen it, Bill, you and I. And we’ve heard it—heard Dagon’s bell ringing in the night, summoning that ancient evil up from the sea.

“Why, that was the old man’s sole solitary reason for living there: so that he could take his revenge! Taciturn? A recluse? I’ll say he was! He lived to kill—to kill them! Tritons, Deep Ones, amphibian abortions born out of a timeless evil, inhuman lust and black, alien nightmare. Well, now I’ll finish what he started, only I’ll do it a damn sight faster! It’s my way or nothing.” He gazed at me, his eyes steady now and piercing, totally sane, strong as I had rarely seen him. “You’ll come?”

“First,” I said, “there’s something you must tell me. About June. She—her looks—I mean...”

“I know what you mean,” his voice contained a tremor, however tightly controlled. “It’s what makes the whole thing real for me. It’s proof positive, as if that were needed now, of all I’ve suspected and discovered of the place. I told you she wouldn’t leave the farm, didn’t I? But did you know it was her idea to buy Kettlethorpe in the first place?”

“You mean she was... lured?”

“Oh, yes, that’s exactly what I mean—but by what? By her blood, Bill! She didn’t know, was completely innocent. Not so her forebears. Her great-grandfather came from America, New England. That’s as far as I care to track it down, and no need now to take it any further. But you must see why I personally have to square it all away?”

I could only nod.

“And you will help?”

“I must be mad,” I answered, nodding again, “—or at best an idiot—but it seems I’ve already committed myself. Yes, I’ll come.”

“Now?”

“Today? At this hour? That would be madness! Before you know it, it’ll be dark, and—”

“Dark, yes!” he broke in on me. “But what odds? It’s always dark down there, Bill. We’ll need electric torches, the more the better. I have a couple at the farm. How about you?”

“I’ve a good heavy-duty torch in the car,” I told him. “Batteries, too.”

“Good! And your shotguns—we’ll need them, I think. But we’re not after pheasant this time, Bill.”

“Where will you get the dynamite?” I asked, perhaps hoping that this was something which, in his fervour, he had overlooked.

He grinned—not his old grin but a twisted, vicious thing—and said: “I’ve already got it. Had it ever since I found the slab two weeks ago and first went down there. My gangers use it on big landscaping jobs. Blasting out large boulders and tree stumps saves a lot of time and effort. Saves money, too. There’s enough dynamite at the farm to demolish half of Harden!”

David had me, and he knew it. “It’s now, Bill, now!” he said. And after a moment’s silence he shrugged. “But—if you haven’t the spit for it—”

“I said I’d come,” I told him, “and so I will. You’re not the only one who loves a mystery, even one as terrifying as this. Now that I know such a place exists, of course I want to see it. I’m not easy about it, no, but...”

He nodded. “Then this is your last chance, for you can be sure it won’t be there for you to see tomorrow!”

IX: DESCENT INTO MADNESS

Within the hour we were ready. Torches, shotguns, dynamite and fusewire—everything we would need—all was in our hands. And as we made our way from the house at Kettlethorpe along the garden paths to the roofless enclosure, already the mists were rising and beginning to creep. And I admit here and now that if David had offered me the chance again, to back out and leave him to go it alone, I believe I might well have done so.

As it was, we entered under the lintel with the plate, found the slab as David had described it, and commenced to lever it up from its seatings. As we worked, my friend nodded his head toward a very old and massive millstone lying nearby. “That’s what Jason Carpenter used to seal it. And do you believe June could have shifted that on her own? Never! She was helped—must have been helped—from below!”

At that moment the slab moved, lifted, was awkward for a moment but at our insistence slid gratingly aside. I don’t know what I expected, but the blast of foul, damp air that rushed up from below took me completely by surprise. It blew full into my face, jetting up like some noxious, invisible geyser, a pressured stench of time and ocean, darkness and damp, and alien things. And I knew it at once: that tainted odour I had first detected in the summer, which David had naively termed “a miasma.”

Was this the source, then, of that misty phantom seen on dark nights, that bloating spectre formed of fog and the rushing reek of inner earth? Patently it was, but that hardly explained the shape the thing had assumed...

In a little while the expansion and egress of pent-up gasses subsided and became more a flow of cold, salty air. Other odours were there, certainly, but however alien and disgusting they no longer seemed quite so unbearable.

Slung over our shoulders we carried part-filled knapsacks which threw us a little off balance. “Careful,” David warned, descending ahead of me, “it’s steep and slippery as hell!” Which was no exaggeration.

The way was narrow, spiralling, almost perpendicular, a stairwell through solid rock which might have been cut by some huge and eccentric drill. Its steps were narrow in the tread, deep in the rise, and slimy with nitre and a film of moisture clammy as sweat. And our powerful torches cutting the way through darkness deep as night, and the walls winding down, down, ever down.

I do not know the depth to which we descended; there was an interminable sameness about that corkscrew of stone which seemed to defy measurement. But I recall something of the characters carved almost ceremoniously into its walls. Undeniably Roman, some of them, but I was equally sure that these were the most recent! The rest, having a weird, almost glyphic angularity and coarseness—a barbaric simplicity of style—must surely have predated any Roman incursion into Britain.

And so down to the floor of that place, where David paused to deposit several sticks of dynamite in a dark niche. Quickly he fitted a fuse, and while he worked so he spoke to me in a whisper which echoed sibilantly away and came rustling back in decreasing susurrations. “A long fuse for this one. We’ll light it on our way out. And at least five more like this before we’re done. I hope it’s enough. God, I don’t even know the extent of the place! I’ve been this far before and farther, but you can imagine what it’s like to be down here on your own...”

Indeed I could imagine it, and shuddered at the thought.

While David worked I stood guard, shotgun under my arm, cocked, pointing it down a black tunnel that wound away to God-knows-where. The walls of this horizontal shaft were curved inward at the top to form its ceiling, which was so low that when we commenced to follow it we were obliged to stoop. Quite obviously the tunnel was no mere work of nature; no, for it was far too regular for that, and everywhere could be seen the marks of sharp tools used to chip out the stone. One other fact which registered was this: that the walls were of the same stone from which Kettlethorpe Farm—in what original form?—must in some dim uncertain time predating all memory, myth and legend have been constructed.

And as I followed my friend, so in some dim recess of my mind I made note of these things, none of which lessened in the slightest degree the terrific weight of apprehension resting almost tangibly upon me. But follow him I did, and in a little while he was showing me fresh marks on the walls, scratches he had made on previous visits to enable him to retrace his steps.

“Necessary,” he whispered, “for just along here the tunnels begin to branch, become a maze. Really—a maze! Be a terrible thing to get lost down here...”

My imagination needed no urging, and after that I followed more closely still upon his heels, scratching marks of my own as we went. And sure enough, within a distance of perhaps fifty paces more, it began to become apparent that David had in no way exaggerated with regard to the labyrinthine nature of the place. There were side tunnels, few at first but rapidly increasing in number, which entered into our shaft from both sides and all manner of angles; and shortly after this we came to a sort of gallery wherein many of these lesser passages met.

The gallery was in fact a cavern of large dimensions with a domed ceiling perhaps thirty feet high. Its walls were literally honeycombed with tunnels entering from all directions, some of which descended steeply to regions deeper and darker still. Here, too, I heard for the first time the sluggish gurgle of unseen waters, of which David informed: “That’s a stream. You’ll see it shortly.”

He laid another explosive charge out of sight in a crevice, then indicated that I should once more follow him. We took the tunnel with the highest ceiling, which after another seventy-five to one hundred yards opened out again onto a ledge that ran above a slow-moving, blackly-gleaming rivulet. The water gurgled against our direction of travel, and its surface was some twenty feet lower than the ledge; this despite the fact that the trough through which it coursed was green and black with slime and incrustations almost fully up to the ledge itself. David explained the apparent ambiguity.

“Tidal,” he said. “The tide’s just turned. It’s coming in now. I’ve seen it fifteen feet deeper than this, but that won’t be for several hours yet.” He gripped my arm, causing me to start. “And look! Look at the kelp...”

Carried on the surface of the as yet sluggish stream, great ropes of weed writhed and churned, bladders glistening in the light from our torches. “David,” my voice wavered, “I think—”

“Come on,” he said, leading off once more. “I know what you think—but we’re not going back. Not yet.” Then he paused and turned to me, his eyes burning in the darkness. “Or you can go back on your own, if you wish...?”

“David,” I hissed, “that’s a rotten thing to—”

“My God, man!” he stopped me. “D’you think you’re the only one who’s afraid?”

However paradoxically, his words buoyed me up a little, following which we moved quickly on and soon came to a second gallery. Just before reaching it the stream turned away, so that only its stench and distant gurgle stayed with us. And once more David laid charges, his actions hurried now, nervous, as if in addition to his admitted fear he had picked up something of my own barely subdued panic.

“This is as far as I’ve been,” he told me, his words coming in a sort of rapid gasping or panting. “Beyond here is fresh territory. By my reckoning we’re now well over a quarter-mile from the entrance.” He flashed the beam of his torch around the walls, causing the shadows of centuries-formed stalactites to flicker and jump. “There, the big tunnel. We’ll take that one.”

And now, every three or four paces, or wherever a side tunnel opened into ours, we were both scoring the walls to mark a fresh and foolproof trail. Now, too, my nerves really began to get the better of me. I found myself starting at every move my friend made; I kept pausing to listen, my heartbeat shuddering in the utter stillness of that nighted place. Or was it still? Did I hear something just then? The echo of a splash and the soft flop, flop of furtive footsteps in the dark? It must be pictured:

We were in a vast subterranean warren. A place hollowed out centuries ago by... by whom? By what? And what revenants lurked here still, down here in these terrible caverns of putrid rock and festering, sewage-like streams?

Slap, slap, slap...

And that time I definitely had heard something. “David—” my voice was thin as a reedy wind. “For God’s sake—”

“Shh!” he warned, his cautionary hiss barely audible. “I heard it too, and they might have heard us! Let me just get the rest of this dynamite planted—one final big batch, it’ll have to be—and then we’ll get out of here.” He used his torch to search the walls but could find no secret place to house the explosives. “Round this next bend,” he said. “I’ll find a niche there. Don’t want the stuff to be found before it’s done its job.”

We rounded the bend, and ahead—

—A glow of rotten, phosphorescent light, a luminescence almost sufficient to make our torches redundant. We saw, and we began to understand.

The roofless building up above—the enclosure—that was merely the entrance. This place here, far underground, was the actual place of worship, the subterranean temple to Dagon. We knew it as soon as we saw the great nitre-crusted bell hanging from the centre of the ceiling—the bell and the rusted iron chain which served as its rope, hanging down until its last link dangled inches above the surface and centre of a black and sullenly rippling lake of scum and rank weed...

***

For all that horror might follow on our very heels, still we found ourselves pulled up short by the sight of that fantastic final gallery. It was easily a hundred feet wall-to-wall, roughly circular, domed over and shelved around, almost an amphitheatre in the shape of its base, and obviously a natural, geological formation. Stalactites hung down from above, as in the previous gallery, and stalagmitic stumps broke the weed-pool’s surface here and there, showing that at some distant time in our planet’s past the cave had stood well above sea level.

As to the source of the pool itself: this could only be the sea. The deep kelp alone was sufficient evidence of that. And to justify and make conclusive this observation, the pool was fed by a broad expanse of water which disappeared under the ledge beneath the far wall, which my sense of direction told me lay toward the sea. The small ripples or wavelets we had noted disturbing the pool’s surface could only be the product of an influx of water from this source, doubtless the flow of the incoming tide.

Then there was the light: that same glow of putrescence or organic decomposition seen in certain fungi, an unhealthy illumination which lent the cave an almost submarine aspect. So that even without the clean light of our electric torches, still the great bell in the ceiling would have remained plainly visible.

But that bell... who could say where it came from? Not I. Not David. Certainly this was that bell whose sepulchral tolling had penetrated even to the surface, but as to its origin...

In that peculiar way of his, David, as if reading my thoughts, confirmed: “Well, it’ll not ring again—not after this lot goes off!” And I saw that he had placed his knapsack full of dynamite out of sight beneath a low, shallow ledge in the wall and was even now uncoiling a generous length of fusewire. Finishing the task, he glanced at me once, struck a match and set sputtering fire to the end of the wire, pushing it, too, out of sight.

“There,” he grunted, “and now we can get—” But here he paused, and I knew why.

The echo of a voice—a croak?—had come to us from somewhere not too far distant. And even as our ears strained to detect other than the slow gurgle of weed-choked waters, so there echoed again that damnably soft and furtive slap, slap, slap of nameless feet against slimy stone...

X: DEEP ONES!

At that panic gripped both of us anew, was magnified as the water of the pool gurgled more loudly yet and ripples showed which could not be ascribed solely to an influx from the sea. Perhaps at this very moment something other than brine and weed was moving toward us along that murky and mysterious watercourse.

My limbs were trembling, and David was in no better condition as, throwing caution to the wind, we commenced scramblingly to retrace our steps, following those fresh marks where we had scratched them upon the walls of the maze. And behind us the hidden fuse slowly sputtering its way to that massive charge of dynamite; and approaching the great pool, some entirely conjectural thing whose every purpose we were sure must be utterly alien and hostile. While ahead... who could say?

But one thing was certain: our presence down here had finally stirred something up—maybe many somethings—and now their noises came to us even above our breathless panting, the hammering of our hearts and the clattering sounds of our flight down those black tunnels of inner earth. Their noises, yes, for no man of the sane upper world of blue skies and clean air could ever have named those echoing, glutinous bursts of sporadic croaking and clotted, inquiring gurgles and grunts as speech; and no one could mistake the slithering, slapping, flopping sounds of their pursuit for anything remotely human. Or perhaps they were remotely human, but so sunken into hybrid degeneracy as to seem totally alien to all human expectations. And all of this without ever having seen these Deep Ones—“Tritons,” as David had named them—or at least, not yet!

But as we arrived at the central gallery and paused for breath, and as David struck a second match to light the fuse of the charge previously laid there, that so far merciful omission commenced to resolve itself in a manner I shall never forget to my dying day.

It started with the senses-shattering gonging of the great bell, whose echoes were deafening in those hellish tunnels, and it ended... but I go ahead of myself.

Simultaneous with the ringing of the bell, a renewed chorus of croaking and grunting came to us from somewhere dangerously close at hand; so that David at once grabbed my arm and half-dragged me into a small side tunnel leading off at an angle from the gallery. This move had been occasioned not alone by the fact that the sounds we had heard were coming closer, but also that they issued from the very burrow by which we must make our escape! But as the madly capricious gods of fate would have it, our momentary haven proved no less terrifying in its way than the vulnerable position we had been obliged to quit.

The hole into which we had fled was no tunnel at all but an “L”-shaped cave which, when we rounded its single corner, laid naked to our eyes a hideous secret. We recoiled instinctively from a discovery grisly as it was unexpected, and I silently prayed that God—if indeed there was any good, sane God—would give me strength not to break down utterly in my extreme of horror.

In there, crumpled where he had finally been overcome, lay the ragged and torn remains of old Jason Carpenter. It could only be him; the similarly broken body of Bones, his dog, lay across his feet. And all about him on the floor of the cave, spent shotgun cartridges; and clasped in his half-rotted, half-mummied hand, that weapon which in the end had not saved him.

But he had fought—how he had fought! Jason, and his dog, too...

Theirs were not the only corpses left to wither and decay in that tomb of a cave. No, for heaped to one side was a pile of quasi-human—debris—almost beyond my powers of description. Suffice to say that I will not even attempt a description, but merely confirm that these were indeed the very monstrosities of David’s tale of crumbling Innsmouth. And if in death the things were loathsome, in life they would yet prove to be worse by far. That was still to come...

***

And so, with our torches reluctantly but necessarily switched off, we crouched there in the fetid darkness amidst corpses of man, dog and nightmares, and we waited. And always we were full of that awful awareness of slowly burning fuses, of time rapidly running out. But at last the tolling of the bell ceased and its echoes died away, and the sounds of the Deep Ones decreased as they made off in a body toward the source of the summoning, and finally we made our move.

Switching on our torches we ran crouching from the cave into the gallery—and came face to face with utmost terror! A lone member of that flopping, frog-voiced horde had been posted here and now stood central in the gallery, turning startled, bulging batrachian eyes upon us as we emerged from our hiding place.

A moment later and this squat obscenity—this part-man, part-fish, part-frog creature—threw up webbed hands before its terrible face, screamed a hissing, croaking cry of rage and possibly agony, and finally hurled itself at us...

...Came frenziedly lurching, flopping and floundering, headlong into a double-barrelled barrage from the weapon I held in fingers which kept on uselessly squeezing the triggers long after the face and chest of the monster had flown into bloody tatters and its body was lifted and hurled away from us across the chamber.

Then David was yelling in my ear, tugging at me, dragging me after him, and... and all of the rest is a chaos, a madness, a nightmare of flight and fear.

I seem to recall loading my shotgun—several times, I think—and I have vague memories of discharging it a like number of times; and I believe that David, too, used his weapon, probably more successfully. As for our targets: it would have been difficult to miss them. There were clutching claws, and eyes bulging with hatred and lust; there was foul, alien breath in our faces, slime and blood and bespattered bodies obstructing our way where they fell; and always a swelling uproar of croaking and flopping and slithering as that place below became filled with the spawn of primal oceans.

Then... the Titan blast that set the rock walls to trembling, whose reverberations had no sooner subsided when a yet more ominous rumbling began... Dust and stony debris rained down from the tunnel ceilings, and a side tunnel actually collapsed into ruin as we fled past its mouth... but finally we arrived at the foot of those upward-winding stone steps in the flue-like shaft which was our exit.

Here my memory grows more distinct, too vivid if anything—as if sight of our salvation sharpened fear-numbed senses—and I see David lighting the final fuse as I stand by him, firing and reloading, firing and reloading. The sharp smell of sulphur and gunpowder in a haze of dust and flickering torch beams, and the darkness erupting anew in shambling shapes of loathsome fright. The shotgun hot in my hands, jamming at the last, refusing to break open.

Then David taking my place and firing point-blank into a mass of mewling horror, and his voice shrill and hysterical, ordering me to climb, climb and get out of that hellish place. From above I look down and see him dragged under, disappearing beneath a clawing, throbbing mass of bestiality; and their frog-eyes avidly turning upward to follow my flight... fangs gleaming in grinning, wide-slit mouths... an instant’s pause before they come squelching and squalling up the steps behind me!

And at last... at last I emerge into moonlight and mist. And with a strength born of madness I hurl the slab into place and weight it with the millstone. For David is gone now and no need to ponder over his fate. It was quick, I saw it with my own eyes, but at least he has done what he set out to do. I know this now, as I feel from far below that shuddering concussion as the dynamite finishes its work.

Following which I stumble from the roofless building and collapse on a path between stunted fruit trees and unnaturally glossy borders of mist-damp shrubbery. And lying there I know the sensation of being shaken, of feeling the earth trembling beneath me, and of a crashing of masonry torn from foundations eaten by the ages.

And at the very end, sinking into a merciful unconsciousness, at last I am rewarded by a sight which will alone allow me, with the dawn, to come awake a sane, whole man. That sight which is simply this: a great drifting mass of mist, dissipating as it coils away over the dene, melting down from the shape of a rage-tormented merman to a thin and formless fog.

For I know that while Dagon himself lives on—as he has “lived” since time immemorial—the seat of his worship which Kettlethorpe has been for centuries is at last no more...

***

That is my story, the story of Kettlethorpe Farm, which with the dawn lay in broken ruins. Not a building remained whole or standing as I left the place, and what has become of it since I cannot say for I never returned and I have never inquired. Official records will show, of course, that there was “a considerable amount of pit subsidence” that night, sinkings and shiftings of the earth with which colliery folk the world over are all too familiar; and despite the fact that there was no storm as such at sea, still a large area of the ocean-fringing cliffs were seen to have sunken down and fallen onto the sands or into the sullen water.

What more is there to say? There was very little deep kelp that year, and in the years since the stuff has seemed to suffer a steady decline. This is hearsay, however, for I have moved inland and will never return to any region from which I might unwittingly spy the sea or hear its wash.

As for June: she died some eight months later giving premature birth to a child. In the interim her looks had turned even more strange, ichthyic, but she was never aware of it for she had become a happy little girl whose mind would never be whole again. Her doctors said that this was just as well, and for this I give thanks.

As well, too, they said, that her child died with her...

ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD AGAIN

by NEIL GAIMAN

IT WAS A bad day: I woke up naked in the bed, with a cramp in my stomach, feeling more or less like hell. Something about the quality of the light, stretched and metallic, like the colour of a migraine, told me it was afternoon.

The room was freezing—literally: there was a thin crust of ice on the inside of the windows. The sheets on the bed around me were ripped and clawed, and there was animal hair in the bed. It itched.

I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week—I’m always tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle myself from the bedding, and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.

The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to the door-frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something.

The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled to the floor, and, before I could manage to raise my head enough to find the toilet bowl, I began to spew.

I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel; some diced carrots and sweetcorn; some lumps of half-chewed meat, raw; and some fingers. They were fairly small, pale fingers, obviously a child’s.

“Shit.”

The cramps eased up, and the nausea subsided. I lay on the floor, with stinking drool coming out of my mouth and nose, with the tears you cry when you’re being sick drying on my cheeks.

When I felt a little better I picked up the paw and the fingers from the pool of spew and threw them into the toilet bowl, flushed them away.

I turned on the tap, rinsed out my mouth with the briny Innsmouth water, and spat it into the sink. I mopped up the rest of the sick as best I could with washcloth and toilet paper. Then I turned on the shower, and stood in the bathtub like a zombie as the hot water sluiced over me.

I soaped myself down, body and hair. The meagre lather turned grey; I must have been filthy. My hair was matted with something that felt like dried blood, and I worked at it with the bar of soap until it was gone. Then I stood under the shower until the water turned icy.

There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two weeks’ rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelations. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she’d thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non-believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.

I crumpled the note, dropped it on the floor, where it lay alongside the Big Mac cartons and the empty pizza cartons, and the long-dead dried slices of pizza.

It was time to go to work.

I’d been in Innsmouth for two weeks, and I disliked it. It smelled fishy. It was a claustrophobic little town: marshland to the east, cliffs to the west, and, between the two, a harbour that held a few rotting fishing boats, and was not even scenic at sunset. The yuppies had come to Innsmouth in the ’80s anyway, bought their picturesque fisherman’s cottages overlooking the harbour. The yuppies had been gone for some years, now, and the cottages by the bay were crumbling, abandoned.

The inhabitants of Innsmouth lived here and there, in and around the town, and in the trailer parks that ringed it, filled with dank mobile homes that were never going anywhere.

I got dressed, pulled on my boots and put on my coat and left my room. My landlady was nowhere to be seen. She was a short, popeyed woman, who spoke little, although she left extensive notes for me pinned to doors and placed where I might see them; she kept the house filled with the smell of boiling seafood: huge pots were always simmering on the kitchen stove, filled with things with too many legs and other things with no legs at all.

There were other rooms in the house, but no one else rented them. No one in their right mind would come to Innsmouth in winter.

Outside the house it didn’t smell much better. It was colder, though, and my breath steamed in the sea air. The snow on the streets was crusty and filthy; the clouds promised more snow.

A cold, salty wind came up off the bay. The gulls were screaming miserably. I felt shitty. My office would be freezing, too. On the corner of Marsh Street and Leng Avenue was a bar, The Opener, a squat building with small, dark windows that I’d passed two-dozen times in the last couple of weeks. I hadn’t been in before, but I really needed a drink, and besides, it might be warmer in there. I pushed open the door.

The bar was indeed warm. I stamped the snow off my boots and went inside. It was almost empty and smelled of old ashtrays and stale beer. A couple of elderly men were playing chess by the bar. The barman was reading a battered old gilt-and-green-leather edition of the poetical works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

“Hey. How about a Jack Daniel’s straight up?”

“Sure thing. You’re new in town,” he told me, putting his book face-down on the bar, pouring the drink into a glass.

“Does it show?”

He smiled, passed me the Jack Daniel’s. The glass was filthy, with a greasy thumb-print on the side, but I shrugged and knocked back the drink anyway. I could barely taste it.

“Hair of the dog?” he said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“There is a belief,” said the barman, whose fox-red hair was tightly greased back, “that the lykanthropoi can be returned to their natural forms by thanking them, while they’re in wolf form, or by calling them by their given names.”

“Yeah? Well, thanks.”

He poured another shot for me, unasked. He looked a little like Peter Lorre, but then, most of the folk in Innsmouth look a little like Peter Lorre, including my landlady.

I sank the Jack Daniel’s, this time felt it burning down into my stomach, the way it should.

“It’s what they say. I never said I believed it.”

“What do you believe?”

“Burn the girdle.”

“Pardon?”

“The lykanthropoi have girdles of human skin, given to them at their first transformation, by their masters in Hell. Burn the girdle.”

One of the old chess-players turned to me then, his eyes huge and blind and protruding. “If you drink rain-water out of warg-wolf’s paw-print, that’ll make a wolf of you, when the moon is full,” he said. “The only cure is to hunt down the wolf that made the print in the first place and cut off its head with a knife forged of virgin silver.”

“Virgin, huh?” I smiled.

His chess partner, bald and wrinkled, shook his head and croaked a single sad sound. Then he moved his queen, and croaked again.

There are people like him all over Innsmouth.

I paid for the drinks, and left a dollar tip on the bar. The barman was reading his book once more, and ignored it.

Outside the bar big wet kissy flakes of snow had begun to fall, settling in my hair and eyelashes. I hate snow. I hate New England. I hate Innsmouth: it’s no place to be alone, but if there’s a good place to be alone I’ve not found it yet. Still, business has kept me on the move for more moons than I like to think about. Business, and other things.

I walked a couple of blocks down Marsh Street—like most of Innsmouth, an unattractive mixture of 18th century American Gothic houses, late 19th century stunted brownstones, and late 20th prefab grey-brick boxes—until I got to a boarded-up fried chicken joint, where I went up the stone steps next to the store and unlocked the rusting metal security door.

There was a liquor store across the street; a palmist was operating on the second floor.

Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: just die, it said. Like it was easy.

The stairs were bare wood; the plaster was stained and peeling. My one-room office was at the top of the stairs.

I don’t stay anywhere long enough to bother with my name in gilt on glass. It was handwritten in block letters on a piece of ripped cardboard that I’d thumbtacked to the door.

LAWRENCE TALBOT

ADJUSTOR

I unlocked the door to my office and went in.

I inspected my office, while adjectives like seedy and rancid and squalid wandered through my head, then gave up, outclassed. It was fairly unprepossessing—a desk, an office chair, an empty filing cabinet; a window, which gave you a terrific view of the liquor store and the empty palmist’s. The smell of old cooking grease permeated from the store below. I wondered how long the fried chicken joint had been boarded up; I imagined a multitude of black cockroaches swarming over every surface in the darkness beneath me.

“That’s the shape of the world that you’re thinking of there,” said a deep, dark voice, deep enough that I felt it in the pit of my stomach.

There was an old armchair in one corner of the office. The remains of a pattern showed through the patina of age and grease the years had given it. It was the colour of dust.

The fat man sitting in the armchair, his eyes still tightly closed, continued, “We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.”

His head was lolled back on the armchair, and the tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.

“You read my mind?”

The man in the armchair took a slow deep breath that rattled in the back of his throat. He really was immensely fat with stubby fingers like discoloured sausages. He wore a thick old coat, once black, now an indeterminate grey. The snow on his boots had not entirely melted.

“Perhaps. The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck.

“Ah well. It’s too late now: the Elder Gods have chosen their vessels. When the moon rises...”

A thin trickle of drool came from one corner of his mouth, trickled down in a thread of silver to his collar. Something scuttled down into the shadows of his coat.

“Yeah? What happens when the moon rises?”

The man in the armchair stirred, opened two little eyes, red and swollen, and blinked them in waking.

“I dreamed I had many mouths,” he said, his new voice oddly small and breathy for such a huge man. “I dreamed every mouth was opening and closing independently. Some mouths were talking, some whispering, some eating, some waiting in silence.”

He looked around, wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth, sat back in the chair, blinking puzzledly. “Who are you?”

“I’m the guy that rents this office,” I told him.

He belched suddenly, loudly. “I’m sorry,” he said, in his breathy voice, and lifted himself heavily from the armchair. He was shorter than I was, when he was standing. He looked me up and down blearily. “Silver bullets,” he pronounced, after a short pause. “Old-fashioned remedy.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “That’s so obvious—must be why I didn’t think of it. Gee, I could just kick myself. I really could.”

“You’re making fun of an old man,” he told me.

“Not really. I’m sorry. Now, out of here. Some of us have work to do.”

He shambled out. I sat down in the swivel chair at the desk by the window, and discovered, after some minutes, through trial and error, that if I swivelled the chair to the left it fell off its base.

So I sat still and waited for the dusty black telephone on my desk to ring, while the light slowly leaked away from the winter sky.

Ring.

A man’s voice: Had I thought about aluminium siding? I put down the phone.

There was no heating in the office. I wondered how long the fat man had been asleep in the armchair.

Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. A crying woman implored me to help her find her five-year-old daughter, missing since last night, stolen from her bed.

The family dog had vanished too.

I don’t do missing children, I told her. I’m sorry: too many bad memories. I put down the telephone, feeling sick again.

It was getting dark now, and, for the first time since I had been in Innsmouth, the neon sign across the street flicked on. It told me that Madame Ezekiel performed TAROT READINGS AND PALMISTRY. Red neon stained the falling snow the colour of new blood.

Armageddon is averted by small actions. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always has to be.

The phone rang a third time. I recognised the voice; it was the aluminium-siding man again. “You know,” he said, chattily, “transformation from man to animal and back being, by definition, impossible, we need to look for other solutions. Depersonalisation, obviously, and likewise some form of projection. Brain damage? Perhaps. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia? Laughably so. Some cases have been treated with intravenous thioridazine hydrochloride.”

“Successfully?”

He chuckled. “That’s what I like. A man with a sense of humour. I’m sure we can do business.”

“I told you already. I don’t need aluminium siding.”

“Our business is more remarkable than that, and of far greater importance. You’re new in town, Mr. Talbot. It would be a pity if we found ourselves at, shall we say, loggerheads?”

“You can say whatever you like, pal. In my book you’re just another adjustment, waiting to be made.”

“We’re ending the world, Mr. Talbot. The Deep Ones will rise out of their ocean graves and eat the moon like a ripe plum.”

“Then I won’t ever have to worry about full moons any more, will I?”

“Don’t try and cross us,” he began, but I growled at him, and he fell silent.

Outside my window the snow was still falling.

Across Marsh Street, in the window directly opposite mine, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen stood in the ruby glare of her neon sign, and she stared at me.

She beckoned, with one finger.

I put down the phone on the aluminium-siding man for the second time that afternoon, went downstairs, and crossed the street at something close to a run; but I looked both ways before I crossed.

She was dressed in silks. The room was lit only by candles, and stank of incense and patchouli oil.

She smiled at me as I walked in, beckoned me over to her seat by the window. She was playing a card game with a Tarot deck, some version of solitaire. As I reached her, one elegant hand swept up the cards, wrapped them in a silk scarf, placed them gently in a wooden box.

The scents of the room made my head pound. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realised; perhaps that was what was making me light-headed. I sat down, across the table from her, in the candle-light.

She extended her hand, and took my hand in hers.

She stared at my palm, touched it, softly, with her forefinger.

“Hair?” She was puzzled.

“Yeah, well. I’m on my own a lot.” I grinned. I had hoped it was a friendly grin, but she raised an eyebrow at me anyway.

“When I look at you,” said Madame Ezekiel, “this is what I see. I see the eye of a man. Also I see the eye of a wolf. In the eye of a man I see honesty, decency, innocence. I see an upright man who walks on the square. And in the eye of a wolf I see a groaning and a growling, night howls and cries, I see a monster running with blood-flecked spittle in the darkness of the borders of the town.”

“How can you see a growl or a cry?”

She smiled. “It is not hard,” she said. Her accent was not American. It was Russian, or Maltese, or Egyptian perhaps. “In the eye of the mind we see many things.”

Madame Ezekiel closed her green eyes. She had remarkably long eyelashes; her skin was pale, and her black hair was never still—it drifted gently around her head, in the silks, as if it were floating on distant tides.

“There is a traditional way,” she told me. “A way to wash off a bad shape. You stand in running water, in clear spring water, while eating white rose petals.”

“And then?”

“The shape of darkness will be washed from you.”

“It will return,” I told her, “with the next full of the moon.”

“So,” said Madame Ezekiel, “once the shape is washed from you, you open your veins in the running water. It will sting mightily, of course. But the river will carry the blood away.”

She was dressed in silks, in scarves and cloths of a hundred different colours, each bright and vivid, even in the muted light of the candles.

Her eyes opened.

“Now,” she said. “The Tarot.” She unwrapped her deck from the black silk scarf that held it, passed me the cards to shuffle. I fanned them, riffed and bridged them.

“Slower, slower,” she said. “Let them get to know you. Let them love you, like... like a woman would love you.”

I held them tightly, then passed them back to her.

She turned over the first card. It was called The Warwolf. It showed darkness and amber eyes, a smile in white and red.

Her green eyes showed confusion. They were the green of emeralds. “This is not a card from my deck,” she said, and turned over the next card. “What did you do to my cards?”

“Nothing, Ma’am. I just held them. That’s all.”

***

The card she had turned over was The Deep One. It showed something green and faintly octopoid. The thing’s mouths—if they were indeed mouths and not tentacles—began to writhe on the card as I watched.

She covered it with another card, and then another, and another. The rest of the cards were blank pasteboard.

“Did you do that?” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“No.”

“Go now,” she said.

“But—”

“Go.” She looked down, as if trying to convince herself I no longer existed.

I stood up, in the room that smelled of incense and candle-wax, and looked out of her window, across the street. A light flashed, briefly, in my office window. Two men, with flashlights, were walking around. They opened the empty filing cabinet, peered around, then took up their positions, one in the armchair, the other behind the door, waiting for me to return. I smiled to myself. It was cold and inhospitable in my office, and with any luck they would wait there for hours until they finally decided I wasn’t coming back.

So I left Madame Ezekiel turning over her cards, one by one, staring at them as if that would make the pictures return; and I went downstairs, and walked back down Marsh Street until I reached the bar.

The place was empty, now; the barman was smoking a cigarette, which he stubbed out as I came in.

“Where are the chess-fiends?”

“It’s a big night for them tonight. They’ll be down at the bay. Let’s see: you’re a Jack Daniel’s? Right?”

“Sounds good.”

He poured it for me. I recognised the thumb-print from the last time I had the glass. I picked up the volume of Tennyson poems from the bar-top.

“Good book?”

The fox-haired barman took his book from me, opened it and read:

“Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth...”

I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”

He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”

He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff-tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.

“They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise...”

“For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”

“Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon, till you reach Manuxet Way and then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door, and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”

“You sure?”

“No one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.

It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground, like white mists. From street level I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign, or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.

We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.

Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:

“Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.

“There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by men and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise...”

He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence, with blown snow stinging our faces.

And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.

Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. The Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.

The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the seashore, more than you could ever see back in the city.

At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting—one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.

“Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.

I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below; classic spook lighting.

“Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminium siding.

“To stop the world ending?”

He laughed at me, then.

The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatological about it...” he murmured, in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.

The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.

“This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the Deep Ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark, old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”

The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.

Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water-dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.

It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.

“Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this; a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”

I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.

Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.

Smell improves, too. The aluminium-siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.

And the figure in the silks...

I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat, and rotten flesh.

The silks fluttered. She was moving towards me. She held the knife.

“Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber colour, and filling my mind with its pale light.

“Madame Ezekiel?”

“You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”

“I don’t die,” I told her. “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night. Remember?”

“It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”

“No.”

The bonfire burned brighter now, burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae, and of slowly-drifting weed; burned with the colour of emeralds.

“You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife, and you kill them. That’s all.”

I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.

She sliced across my throat.

Blood began to gush, and then to flow. And then it slowed, and stopped...

—The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming towards me from the night

—I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt —my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night.

My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air. I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow. I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her. There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist surrounding me. High in my leap I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soapbubble...

***

I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor, at the entrance to some kind of citadel, built of enormous, rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

She was standing in the doorway, in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms, and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think any more.

She moved towards me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.

I pushed with my hind-legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face, and felt something rend and tear.

It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep...

***

I landed softly on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws.

The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.

The silver knife lay on the ground, in the snow. I waited on all fours, in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.

I was dizzy, and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs.

Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the frog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they plop-plopped down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.

There was a loud noise. It was the fox-haired bartender, the popeyed aluminium-siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.

He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”

I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but I couldn’t talk any more, only growl and whine and howl.

He was crying. He stank of insanity, and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliffside as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark grey. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff, until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

“What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.”

I bristled.

“No, it’s over, for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names, while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

I looked up at the fat man, and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck, sleepily.

“Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane, in any material sense.”

The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

“Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the selfsame celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath...”

He continued talking, in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning: I had no further interest in the sea or the clifftop or the fat man.

There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter night’s air.

And I was, above all things, hungry.

***

I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.

The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.

My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon it would be whole once more.

The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.

I was cold and naked and bloody and alone; ah well, I thought: it happens to all of us, in the beginning. I just get it once a month.

I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn, or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.

A hawk flew low over the snow toward me, with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small grey squid in the snow at my feet, and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.

I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care any more; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.

AFTERWORD

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, where he still lives with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

PS Publishing recently published the novels Ghosts Know and The Kind Folk, along with the definitive edition of his early Arkham House collection, Inhabitant of the Lake, which includes all the first drafts of the stories, along with new illustrations by Randy Broecker. Forthcoming from the same publisher is a new Lovecraftian novella, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki.

Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is also President of both the British Fantasy Society and the Society of Fantastic Films.

“‘The Church in High Street’ is more of a collaboration between me and August Derleth than his HPL ‘collaborations’ were,” observes the author.

“The first book of Lovecraft’s I read made me into a writer. I read it in a single malingering day off school, and for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but the greatest writer I had ever read. I wrote my Lovecraftian tales for my own pleasure: the pleasure of convincing myself that they were as good as the originals.

“It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been gentler if he’d realised I was only fifteen years old.

“I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing. Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten ‘The Tomb-Herd’, which he accepted under certain conditions: that the title should be changed to ‘The Church in the High Street’ (though he later dropped the latter article) and that he should be able to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several passages that are Derleth’s paraphrases of what I wrote.

“Quite right too: as I think he realised, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.”

DAVE CARSON was born in Northern Ireland in 1955. He first discovered the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft when he came across ‘The Lurking Fear’ in a 1960s issue of The Magazine of Horror. He was hooked for life and has since become one of the genre’s most acclaimed and respected illustrators of the author’s work. It was probably in the pages of that same digest magazine that he first saw the artwork of Virgil Finlay and his personal favourite, Lee Brown Coye.

It was not until 1978 that he began to take a more serious approach to his illustration work, developing his use of the pen and ink stipple technique. The following year he discovered The British Fantasy Society and soon he was being published in such magazines as Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Weirdbook, Nyctalops, Kadath, Fantasy Book, Ghosts and Scholars, Dark Horizons, Fear, Skeleton Crew, Interzone, Imagine, White Dwarf and many others.

The artist’s iconic 1979 poster ‘H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937’ is still selling to this day and was even reproduced in Fortean Times and The Observer’s Review supplement to accompany a book review about Lovecraft.

Among the numerous books that Carson’s artwork has appeared in are: Tales Out of Innsmouth: New Stories of the Children of Dagon, Brian Lumley’s Ghoul Warning, Mad Moon of Dreams and The Clock of Dreams, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, the Dark Voices: The Pan Books of Horror series, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: A Guide to Lovecraftian Horror, the “Fighting Fantasy” role-playing book Beneath Nightmare Castle, Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Horror Painting Workshop and The Octopus Encyclopedia of Horror.

He also co-edited (with Stephen Jones) and illustrated H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, and his artwork was featured in the documentary film The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision and Phenomena of H.P Lovecraft.

Having redesigned and sculpted the statuette himself in the early 1980s, Dave Carson has received the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist on five occasions. When asked on a convention panel why he became an artist, he replied “I just like to draw monsters.” It shows.

ADRIAN COLE was born in 1949 in Devon, where he still lives. He is the author of twenty-five novels and numerous short stories, writing in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, sword & sorcery and horror.

His first books were published in the 1970s—“The Dream Lords” trilogy—and he went on to write, among others, the “Omaran Saga” and the “Star Requiem” series, as well as writing two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.

More recently, he has had several books published by Wildside Press, including the “Voidal” trilogy, which collects all the original short stories from the 1970s and ’80s and adds new material to complete the saga. The same imprint has also published the novel Night of the Heroes, an affectionate celebration of the world of pulp fiction, as well as Young Thongor, which Cole has edited and which includes the previously uncollected short “Thongor” stories of Lin Carter.

The author’s latest SF novel is The Shadow Academy from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, with an audio version available from Audible. His short stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and he has written and performed a number of parodies of the genres he loves at various conventions in the past.

“I discovered HPL when I was sixteen,” explains Cole, “working in my school holidays in a hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, for a summer season. In the many bookshops of Newquay I picked up The Lurking Fear and found therein the wonderful ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’—its impact on me was instant and long-lasting. (I’ve spent years perfecting the Innsmouth squint.)

“The image of the New England town stayed in my mind, and when I moved to North Devon in 1976, I was stunned to find myself living a few miles from what I took to be the English equivalent of Innsmouth, namely Appledore. Now, don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t dream of insulting the good people of Appledore, even when they squint at me, but its atmosphere, its close-set houses, and its setting so close to the sea (estuary, to be accurate) readily call up the feel of Innsmouth. And at certain times of night, when the tide is right and the moon rises across the water... well. But it’s no problem for me. As I said, I live a couple of miles away.

“Bideford is nothing like Appledore—bigger quayside, steeper hills, narrower side roads, more houses, older... next door is the old charnel house. But none of this has influenced me. I only swim up and down to the estuary at night to be sociable. Doesn’t everyone?”

BASIL COPPER (1914-2013) was born in London, and for thirty years he worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.

His first story in the horror field, ‘The Spider’, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night, Cold Hand on My Shoulder and Knife in the Back.

One of the author’s most reprinted stories, ‘Camera Obscura,’ was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in several volumes, including the novel Solar Pons versus The Devil’s Claw.

More recently, PS Publishing has produced the non-fiction study Basil Copper: A Life in Books, and a massive two-volume set of Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper. A restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers appeared from the same imprint in 2012.

With ‘Beyond the Reef’, the author explained, he “...wanted the atmosphere to be of a ‘faded 1920s variety’ as in HPL’s original tales, but without being too much of a pastiche or derivative in any way.”

NEIL GAIMAN is only mentioned in passing in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in the Lovecraft-Derleth story ‘The Survivor’, in which it is revealed that the mysterious Dr. Charriere has a recognisable drawing of Gaiman on his wall, along with certain cabalistic charts, and pictures of large reptiles.

He has, however, a bust of Lovecraft on his windowsill (the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story), and lives in a remarkably Lovecraftian house, somewhere a long way from the sea.

Gaiman is the most critically acclaimed British graphic novel writer of his generation. He co-wrote the best-selling novel Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), is the author of Neverwhere and American Gods, and became the first person ever to win the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal for the same children’s novel, The Graveyard Book, which spent more than fifty-two consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book has also won the Hugo Award, the Booktrust Award and many others.

During the past few years, Gaiman has co-scripted (with Roger Avary) Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture fantasy film Beowulf, while Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline were both based on his novels. He wrote and directed Statuesque, a short film starring Bill Nighy and his wife, singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, and he has also just written his second episode of Doctor Who for the BBC.

The story in this volume is dedicated to the late Fritz Leiber.

DAVID LANGFORD was born in Newport, Wales, in 1953, and some eleven years later discovered that he could borrow all H.P. Lovecraft’s books from the library if he assured his mother they were “nice detective stories.”

One vivid memory, of eating porridge while reading of his first Shoggoth, is best not shared.

He has since become a freelance writer, editor and critic, dividing his creative endeavours between books and science fiction fandom (winning the Hugo Award multiple times). His novels include The Leaky Establishment, The Space Eater and The Wilderness of Mirrors, along with Earthdoom! and Guts! (both co-written with John Grant), while a collection of short pastiches appeared under the title He Do the Time Police in Different Voices.

Langford helped produce the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and contributed around 80,000 words of articles to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He is also one of the three chief editors of the third, online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The End of Harry Potter? was an unauthorised companion to the best-selling series by J.K. Rowling.

He continues to edit and publish his free monthly newsletter, Ansible, and has never really regained the taste for porridge.

D.F. LEWIS had two of his stories rejected in 1968 by August Derleth for being “pretty much pure grue,” since when he has had more than 1,500 tales published in small press magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Described variously as “the Lovecraft of this era” and “either a genius graced with madness (or) a madman cursed with genius,” he cites H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Robert Aickman and Philip K. Dick amongst his disparate literary influences.

As an editor, he has produced ten volumes of the Nemonymous “megazanthus” anthology series, along with The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies.

In 1998 the author was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s special Karl Edward Wagner Award.

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) is one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he lived most of his life there as a studious antiquarian who wrote mostly with no care for commercial reward. During his lifetime, the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry and essays appeared in obscure amateur press journals or in the pages of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Following the author’s untimely death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded the publishing imprint of Arkham House in 1939 with the initial idea of keeping all Lovecraft’s work in print. Beginning with The Outsider and Others, his stories were collected in such hardcover volumes as Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Marginalia, Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Dreams and Fancies, The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 3 Tales of Horror and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, along with several volumes of “posthumous collaborations” with Derleth, including The Lurker at the Threshold, The Survivor and Others and The Watchers Out of Time and Others.

During the decades since his death, Lovecraft has been acknowledged as a mainstream American writer second only to Edgar Allan Poe, while his relatively small body of work has influenced countless imitators and formed the basis of a world-wide industry of books, role-playing games, graphic novels, toys and movies based on his concepts.

BRIAN LUMLEY started his writing career by emulating the work of H.P. Lovecraft and has ended up with his own, highly enthusiastic, fan following for his world-wide best-selling series of ‘Necroscope’ vampire books.

Born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast, Lumley joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and served in the Corps of Royal Military Police for twenty-two years, until his retirement in December 1980.

After discovering Lovecraft’s stories while stationed in Berlin in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially based around the influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth, and Arkham House published two collections of the author’s stories, The Caller of the Black and The Horror at Oakdene and Others, along with the short novel, Beneath the Moors.

Lumley then continued Lovecraft’s themes in such novels and collections as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, The Compleat Crow, Hero of Dreams, Ship of Dreams, Mad Moon of Dreams, Iced on Iran and Other Dreamquests, The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land, Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (which includes the British Fantasy Award-winning title story), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales and Dagon’s Bell and Other Discords. The author’s most recent book is a new collection of non-Lovecraftian horror stories, No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories, from Subterranean Press, and he has also completed a new ‘Necroscope’ novella for the same publisher.

The Brian Lumley Companion was published in 2002 by Tor Books, and he is the winner of a Fear Magazine Award, a Lovecraft Film Festival Association “Howie,” the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and, most recently, a recipient of the Horror Writers’ Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

“H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology—especially his Deep Ones, those batrachian dwellers in fathomless ocean employed so effectively in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and frequently hinted at elsewhere in HPL’s fiction—always fascinated me,” explains the author, “as it has fascinated many a writer before and after, and as it will doubtless continue to do.

“In 1978 I wrote a full-length novel based on the Deep Ones, entitled (with brilliant originality!) The Return of the Deep Ones. Looking back, it was probably an error to set the story in a locale with which I wasn’t overly familiar, but I covered as best I could.

“The story in this volume, however, makes use of a location with which I’m very familiar; in fact it’s the north-east coast of England, where I was raised. If you should find that ‘Dagon’s Bell’ rings true, that’s probably the reason.”

MARTIN McKENNA was born in London and started out in illustration with work for fantasy and horror small press magazines in the 1980s, in particular in the H.P. Lovecraft-devoted Dagon.

His first professional commissions came from Games Workshop for their magazine White Dwarf, and this began a long relationship with the company, illustrating numerous Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay publications and the very first Warhammer 40,000 book, as well as many other GW books and boardgames. He has also created game-related material for other publishers, including covers and internal illustrations for more than twenty of the Fighting Fantasy series, along with card art for Magic: The Gathering.

The British Fantasy Award-winning artist has also produced work for various publishers around the world, illustrating such popular authors as Anne McCaffrey, Raymond E. Feist and Harry Turtledove, as well as such classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Silver Sword. More recently, he has illustrated the children’s Christmas book The Gift by Australian writer Penny Matthews.

As an author, McKenna has written a number of books about digital art, including Digital Fantasy Painting Workshop and Digital Horror Art, and edited Fantasy Art Now. In addition to work in publishing, he also produces concept and production art for computer games and film and television productions, which have included the BAFTA-nominated The Magician of Samarkand for the BBC and, most recently, Gulliver’s Travels for Twentieth Century Fox.

“Innsmouth, with its air of wormy decay and its sinister folk with their unwholesome relationship with the sea, is particularly visually evocative,” observes the artist. “Many strong images come to mind, such as the jagged skyline of sagging gambrel roofs and rotten streets with unnaturally shaped residents loping through the gloom. It’s doing justice to it all that’s the problem.

“I particularly wanted to portray some of the Innsmouth folk at various stages of their degeneration. I also wanted to use certain ordinary marine creatures in some of the illustrations, as I find many of these can appear fairly alarming in themselves.

“When we first came up with the notion of collaborating on some Lovecraftian artwork, I knew I wanted to have a go at portraying Cthulhu. Both Jim and Dave have dealt with Him in the past, and although I’ve tackled a few fairly eldritch things I’ve never had the opportunity to approach this subject before now. The finished collaboration recently hung in a convention art show where I overheard one viewer remark that it was ‘absolutely disgusting’, which made it seem all the more worthwhile.”

BRIAN MOONEY has been contributing short stories to magazines and anthologies for more than forty years, although he has never been prolific.

His first professional appearance was in The London Mystery Selection in 1971, since when his fiction has appeared in The Pan Book of Horror Stories, Dark Voices, Dark Detectives, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Final Shadows, Fantasy Tales, Dark Horizons and Fiesta, amongst other titles.

About his protagonist in ‘The Tomb of Priscus’, the author explains: “Like many of us, when I first started writing I toyed with Lovecraftian tales. Reuben Calloway made his first appearance as a minor character in a Mythos story which I have never bothered to rewrite. Then his name is mentioned in ‘The Guardians of the Gates, published in the second issue of Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. His first appearance in his own right, with his amanuensis, Father Roderick Shea, was in ‘The Affair at Durmamnay Hall’, published in Kadath No. 5. Calloway is by himself in a werewolf story in The Anthology of Fantasy and the Supernatural.

“I see him as being something of a scruffy Orson Welles with all the arrogance but without the charm.”

KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club.

Newman’s non-fiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (contributing the latter’s popular ‘Video Dungeon’ column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries.

The author’s stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into episodes of the TV series The Hunger, and the latter tale was also turned into an Australian short film in 2009. Following his Radio 4 play Cry Babies, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for BBC Radio 7’s series The Man in Black, and he was a main contributor to the 2012 stage play The Hallowe’en Sessions. He has also directed and written a tiny film, Missing Girl.

Newman’s most recent books include expanded reissues of his acclaimed Anno Dracula series and the “Professor Moriarty” novel The Hound of the d’Urbervilles (all from Titan Books), along with a much-enlarged edition of Nightmare Movies (from Bloomsbury).

“Like everyone in the field, I went through a period, at about thirteen, reading H.P. Lovecraft,” he reveals. “His Cthulhu Mythos (actually worked into something systematic by August Derleth) is one of the pervasive ideas of horror and science fiction.

“With a last line in the tradition of Lovecraft disciple Robert Bloch, my story is a fond homage to one of my favourite HPL stories, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.

“‘One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)’, by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, was introduced in 1943, not by Frank Sinatra (who sang it in 1958 on the Only the Lonely album) but by Fred Astaire in the otherwise forgettable movie The Sky’s the Limit. I apologise for mutating the song.”

JIM PITTS made his debut as an illustrator in David A. Sutton’s Bibliotheca: H.P. Lovecraft and Jon Harvey’s Balthus in 1971. Over the subsequent four decades, his artwork has appeared extensively in British, European and American publications such as Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Shadow and numerous British Fantasy Society publications, including Dark Horizons and Chills.

He has also illustrated various hardcover and paperback collections, such as Michel Parry’s Savage Heroes and Spaced Out, and Brian Lumley’s The Compleat Khash: Volume One. Other aspects of his work include paperback covers, a record sleeve and the odd sculpture.

He was awarded the Ken McIntyre Award in the early 1970s and, after years of being nominated, he received the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist in both 1991 and 1992.

Influences he acknowledges include the Weird Tales artists such as Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye and, more importantly, Hannes Bok, without whose inspiration he admits things could have turned out very differently.

“The stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have always been an enthusiasm of mine,” reveals the artist, “and having the opportunity to join forces with Dave Carson and Martin McKenna, two of the best illustrators working in the British fantasy scene today, to work on this book was a dream come true.

“Our first collaboration sprang independently of this project in 1993 at a convention in Scarborough on England’s north-east coast (curiously enough, a region well known for its fishing industry). Within a couple of months, Martin came up with the central figure of Cthulhu, I then took the bottom centre and left side and Dave completed the bottom right and upper right side. Hopefully our efforts to capture the wormy, crumbling buildings and degenerate fishy folk of Innsmouth will be worthy of Lovecraft’s wonderful story and so justify the long hours the three of us have spent at the drawing boards.”

NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of six novels, two novellas and two collections (the most recent being London Labyrinth). He has also published more than 100 horror short stories and has edited fifteen original anthologies, including Darklands, Darklands 2, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, The Best British Short Stories 2011 and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds.

Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in the form of signed, limited-edition chapbooks.

His first short story collection, Mortality, was short-listed for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize, and he is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award and the Bad Sex Prize - and hopes to win both again.

About his story in this book, he recalls: “I travelled widely in Eastern Europe between 1987 and 1989, and pre-revolutionary Bucharest remains the most depressing place I have ever visited. With its tangible atmosphere of fear and paranoia it was like something out of a nightmare.

“I was not lucky enough to set eyes on the reviled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but then I lived in London for eight years and I never saw Margaret Thatcher either. Come the revolution.”

GUY N. SMITH was born and raised in the village of Hopwas in Staffordshire. His mother was a historical author, and she encouraged her son to write from an early age. He was first published at the age of twelve in a local newspaper.

While working as a bank manager, he wrote his first three novels— Werewolf by Moonlight, The Sucking Pit and Slime Beast—but it was the publication in 1976 of Night of the Crabs that gave him his first best-seller. A further five books in the series followed.

In addition to the 116 books he has written since 1974, the author also runs Black Hill Books, selling vintage and modern editions. The Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed in 1992.

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH was born in Knutsford, Cheshire, and grew up in the United States, South Africa and Australia. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and son.

Smith’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and, under his full name, he has published the modern SF novels Only Forward, Spares and One of Us. He is the only person to have won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story four times—along with the August Derleth, International Horror Guild and Philip K. Dick awards.

Writing as “Michael Marshall” he has published six international best-selling novels of suspense, including The Straw Men and The Intruders, currently in development with the BBC. His most recent novels are Killer Move and We Are Here.

“As regards me and Lovecraft,” admits the author, “there’s probably not much of interest. ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ is certainly up there in my favourites of his, along with ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’. One of my all-time favourite phrases comes from the latter: ‘... and the bloodworts grew insolent in their chromatic perversity.’ Top of the list is At the Mountains of Madness, which—and this is going to sound massively pretentious—I religiously read on transatlantic flights, timing it so that the plane is over Newfoundland or similarly bleak and arctic-looking territories for the climax of the story.

“As for ‘To See the Sea’, there’s not much to say, except that (a) it leapt full-grown into my head and (b) I’m glad to finally have got my feelings about a particular car park I know off my chest.”

BRIAN STABLEFORD was born in 1948 in the Yorkshire town of Shipley. He lectured in sociology at the University of Reading until 1988, before becoming a full-time writer, editor, critic and translator.

His more than seventy novels include Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, To Challenge Chaos, The Halcyon Drift, Swan Song, Man in a Cage, The Mind-Readers, The Realms of Tartarus, The Walking Shadow, Optiman (aka War Games), The Castaways of Tanagar, The Gates of Eden, The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, The Angel of Pain, Young Blood, Firefly, The Carnival of Destruction, Serpent’s Blood, The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, Warhammer 4000: Pawns of Chaos (as “Brian Craig”), Salamander’s Fire, Chimera’s Cradle, Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, Year Zero, The Eleventh Hour, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat, The Omega Expedition, Kiss the Goat, Streaking, The Wayward Muse, The Stones of Camelot, The Shadow of Frankenstein, Frankenstein and the Vampire Countess, Frankenstein in London and The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance in Piracy.

His short fiction is collected in a number of volumes, including Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, Complications and Other Stories, Designer Genes and Other Stories, Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies, Sheena & Other Gothic Tales, The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions, The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales & Contes Cruels, The Gardens of Tantalus and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels, amongst many titles.

A prolific writer about the history of imaginative fiction, he was a leading contributor to the award-winning The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and contributed a number of articles to Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. He has also published numerous non-fiction books, several anthologies and volumes of translations relating to the French and English Decadent movements of the late 19th century.

In 1999, Stableford was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his contributions to SF scholarship. This completed his set of the four major awards in the field, the others being the J. Lloyd Eaton Award (1987), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1987) and the SFRA’s Pioneer Award (1996).

DAVID A. SUTTON was born and lives in Birmingham, England. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award and twelve British Fantasy Awards for editing magazines and anthologies.

As an editor, his first professional anthologies were New Writings in Horror & Supernatural (originally published in two volumes and recently reissued as an omnibus entitled Horror! Under the Tombstone) and The Satyr’s Head & Other Tales of Terror. With Stephen Jones he went on to co-edit the Fantasy Tales, Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror and Dark Terrors: The Gollancz Book of Horror series while, more recently, he has edited the anthologies Phantoms of Venice and Houses on the Borderland.

Sutton has been a genre fiction writer since the 1960s. Some early stories appeared in World of Horror, Dark Horizons and Cthulhu, while respected anthology editor Hugh Lamb selected stories for two anthologies in the 1970s, The Taste of Fear and Cold Fear. Since then his fiction has been published in such magazines and anthologies as More Ghosts & Scholars, Kadath, Gothic, Skeleton Crew, The New Lovecraft Circle, Final Shadows, The Merlin Chronicles, The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, When Graveyards Yawn, Dark Reign, Dead Ends, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream, The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows and The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.

The Fisherman was a chapbook from Gary William Crawford’s Gothic Press, while his debut short story collection, Clinically Dead & Other Tales of the Supernatural, was published in 2009 by Screaming Dreams. The author’s own imprint, Shadow Publishing, has recently produced such books as The Female of the Species & Other Terror Tales by Richard Davis, Frightfully Cosy and Mild Stories for Nervous Types by Johnny Mains, and The Whispering Horror by Eddy C. Bertin.

“When the editor told me he was putting together an anthology based around a single H.P. Lovecraft story,” recalls Sutton, “I immediately thought it might be ‘The Colour Out of Space’, or ‘The Dunwich Horror’, or ‘The Shunned House’. The story he chose is one of the author’s major yarns, but I wouldn’t have pegged it as the focus for the present book.

“However, re-reading ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ after quite a number of years, its stature for me has grown. It is a deeply disturbing story, full of ideas from which to draw another tale. Lovecraft’s blending of the Federal raid on Devil Reef, the weird religious Dagon sect, the attention to historical detail, the resonance of the Cthulhu Mythos and the grim half-humans and Deep Ones, all make this a wonderfully creepy story.”

“PETER TREMAYNE” is the pseudonym of acclaimed Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis. Born in Coventry, England, of Irish descent on his father’s side, he travelled widely in Ireland, studying its history, politics, language and mythology.

As “Tremayne” he made his début with the short horror novel Hound of Frankenstein in 1977, since when he has published such books as The Vengeance of She, Dracula Unborn (aka Bloodright), The Revenge of Dracula, The Ants, The Curse of Loch Ness, The Fires of Lan-Kern, Dracula My Love, Zombie!, The Morgow Rises!, The Destroyers of Lan-Kern, Snowbeast, The Buccaneers of Lan-Kern, Raven of Destiny, Kiss of the Cobra, Swamp!, Angelus!, Nicor!, Trollnight, Ravenmoon (aka Bloodmist) and Island of Shadows.

In 1994 he published Absolution of Murder, the first of his international best-selling murder mystery novels about 7th century Irish advocate Sister Fidelma, who uses the ancient Brehon Law system. There are now twenty-four titles in the series, including the collection Whispers of the Dead.

Tremayne has edited Masters of Terror: William Hope Hodgson and Irish Masters of Fantasy, his short stories are collected in My Lady of Hy-Brasil and Other Stories, Aisling and Other Irish Tales of Terror and An Ensuing Evil and Others: Fourteen Historical Mysteries, and he collaborated with Peter Haining on the 1997 non-fiction study The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula.

He has also written biographies of authors H. Rider Haggard, W.E. Johns and Talbot Mundy, and from 1983-93 he published eight adventure thrillers under another pseudonym, “Peter MacAlan.”

“The Irish language contains Europe’s third oldest literature with a mythology second to none,” explains the author. “While H.P. Lovecraft (in his seminal essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’) tended to dismiss Irish horror tales as ‘more whimsically fantastic than terrible’, he had to rely for his judgment on translators of Irish folklore such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, etc. who were not primarily concerned with the cosmic horror of the weird tale.

“Lovecraft made the mistake of thinking of Irish writers of the true weird, such as Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitzjames O’Brien and Bram Stoker, as ‘British’ and not Irish. In Irish myth there appear the ancient gods of evil known as the Fomorii (Dwellers under the Sea) and an ancient synonym for these beings is Daoine Domhain— the Deep Ones. Could the terrible clashes between the Irish deities of Light and Darkness have been carried to the New World by Irish immigrants to be picked up as Lovecraft’s tales of the Deep Ones?

“My story is inspired by some local Cork traditions about the O’Driscoll clan who dwelt on the now mainly deserted islands off the mainland Irish port of Baltimore (Baile an Tigh Moir—the town of the big house), whose name was also taken to the New World by Irish migrants.”

JACK YEOVIL is an amnesiac who took his name from the West Country town in which he was found in 1989. He has no recollection of his previous life. He has written for Empire and Good Times magazines, contributed stories to the GW Books anthologies Ignorant Armies, Wolf Riders, Red Thirst and Route 666, all edited by David Pringle, and has written the novels Drachenfels, Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Comeback Tour, Beasts in Velvet and Genevieve Undead.

His greatest literary influences are Robert Faulcon, Harry Adam Knight, Carl Dreadstone and Jack Martin, and he describes his story in this book as “...a tribute to two great authors, awkward outsiders, who used a despised genre to make a genuine contribution to English and American letters. If you write in their genre, you must be influenced by them, and if you’re a reader who seeks a way into the genre, you could do no better than start with them: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler.

“It occurred to me that Chandler and Lovecraft had a lot in common. Born in 1888 and 1890 respectively, they lived unhappily in America but dreamed of a lost and imaginary England. Awkward outsiders, they were often beset with financial troubles and began their writing careers in pulp magazines. Their visionary, challenging work was first presented alongside lurid dross, though they later came to be recognised as central to separate movements within their chosen genres, hard-boiled crime and weird horror.

“Married strangely to older wives, they distrusted and feared women, often presenting cruel, almost inhuman female characters. Some of their greatest work is set in seaside towns whose physical corruption has an almost philosophical dimension. Since their deaths, they have become the most imitated and influential writers in their fields and are capable of inspiring entire collections devoted to their characters and themes, not to mention many of the bestselling novelists in their categories.

“Personally, I found the love of Chandler’s prose which I developed in my late teens helped cure habits I’d picked up through an earlier interest in Lovecraft. With ‘The Big Fish’, I wanted to bring a touch of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth to Chandler’s Bay City, fusing elements from ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and Farewell, My Lovely. If its narrator isn’t quite Philip Marlowe, he certainly would like to be. I see him as more like Dick Powell than Humphrey Bogart. The stylistic tangle the story can’t resolve has something to do with the disparity between a Lovecraft protagonist, who is always overwhelmed by his hostile world, and a Chandler hero, who somehow shrugs it off.

“The other set of cross-generic twins of the period are Robert E. Howard and Cornell Woolrich, a pair of mother-dominated paranoid miseries whose vision of a hostile universe makes Lovecraft’s cosmic horror seem quite sunny; but I can’t envision a story in which Conan Wears Black, though a chance meeting in a diner with Bob and Cornell comparing photographs of their mothers has some horrific possibility.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Dorothy Lumley, Steve Saffel, Cath Trechman, Natalie Laverick, Jo Fletcher, Bob Garcia and the late James Turner of Arkham House for their help, all the contributors, and, especially, to Philip J. Rahman and Dwayne H. Olson, whose enthusiasm and support made this book possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN JONES is one of Britain’s most acclaimed anthologists of horror and dark fantasy. He has more than 125 books to his credit, including Shadows Over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror (with Dave Carson), H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre. He has won numerous awards for his work, including three World Fantasy Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com