The Coming of the Old Ones by Jeffrey Thomas

Author:Jeffrey Thomas [Thomas, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forma Street Press
Published: 2019-07-29T06:00:00+00:00

SCRIMSHAW

Massachusetts, 1851

The roar had been going on without cease for three solid days now.

It came from out to sea, but it rolled through the streets of New Bedford like an unbroken boom of thunder, causing people to speak very loudly or even yell to be heard in conversation, causing people to stuff their ears at night with little balls of candle wax so they might sleep, or try to sleep. The roar was so deep in tone it rumbled inside one’s body like a vibration, though occasionally there would be overlapping notes, layers of other sounds. One of these was like a sustained blast, or series of blasts, on a trumpet…carrying from far away but abrupt enough to make one flinch. Superimposed over these sudden bleats and the consistent roar, there might be a crystalline ringing sound which penetrated one’s ears like icicles. Usually, however, it was just the baritone roar.

“Perhaps it is a snore, not a roar,” Nathanial Hittle said to Charlotte, who had early on invited all the ship’s crew to call her by the nickname her husband, Captain Grigg, used, which was Lottie. Nathanial in turn had asked her to call him Nate.

“I am sorry – what did you say?” she cried, tilting her pretty head toward him. She had come to see him in his parents’ home, to insure that he had fully recovered from the illness he had suffered aboard the Coinchenn.

“I said,” Nate shouted, “perhaps it is a snore, not a roar!” Lottie Grigg still looked confused, so he explained, “What I mean is, perhaps the thing is sleeping.”

“Ah! But what I have heard said is, the Fallen were sleeping, but at that time they were absent from our world. When they awoke, they came to be among us.”

“It was but a joke,” Nate said.

Lottie, perhaps not having heard him, went on speaking with the projection of a stage actress who wanted the last rows to hear her. “My husband tells me they simply move far more slowly than we do, because the current of time they live in is not the same time we occupy. The Fallen are here with us temporally in the sense of the body, but not temporally when we speak of time.”

Was the captain such an expert on these entities, then? Being seen by society as superior to the common man – certainly, Grigg perceived himself to be, and impressed that belief upon his crew – was he privy to knowledge that the likes of Nate and even Mrs. Grigg were not?

“So I have heard it said, as well,” Nate said, edging a little closer to Lottie so that she might hear him better, though that was not the only reason he wished to minimize the space between them. “Which is why this roar causes me concern. This is the longest yet heard from one of them, at least to my knowledge. What might be only a short cry to this creature – say, a brief exclamation of rage or dismay, or some emotion utterly inconceivable to us – for us could go on for days longer.

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