Shadows Over Innsmouth by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781165317
Publisher: Titan

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

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

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

Within were the waving streams of light, though I was unable to make out their source or their reason, except that they emanated from beneath the water that formed an undulating floor within the building. This I noted in one brief moment, before all my attention was focused on the forms which emerged through the water, some of them swimming, some wading in the shallows towards me. I think I screamed then, and I turned to make desperate flight from that unholy spot. But

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