The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: h.p. lovecraft, jules verne, sherlock holmes, cthulhu, arthur conan doyle
ISBN: 9781434448910
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2012-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

THE IMMORTALS OF ATLANTIS

Sheila never answered the door when the bell rang because there was never anyone there that she wanted to see, and often someone there that she was desperate to avoid. The latter category ranged from debt collectors and the police to Darren’s friends, who were all apprentice drug-dealers, and Tracy’s friends, who were mostly veteran statutory rapists. Not everyone took no for an answer, of course; the fact that debt-collectors and policemen weren’t really entitled to kick the door in didn’t seem to be much of a disincentive. It was, however, very unusual for anyone to use subtler means of entry, so Sheila was really quite surprised when the whitehaired man appeared in her sitting-room without being preceded by the slightest sound of splintering wood.

“I did ring,” he said, laboring the obvious, “but you didn’t answer.”

“Perhaps,” she said, not getting up from her armchair or reaching for the remote, “that was because I didn’t want to let you in.”

Even though she hadn’t even reached for the remote, the TV switched itself off. It wasn’t a matter of spontaneously flipping into stand-by mode, as it sometimes did, but of switching itself off. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, so she hadn’t so much been watching it as using it to keep her company in the absence of anything better, but the interruption seemed a trifle rude all the same.

“Did you do that?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We need to talk.”

The phrase made her wonder if he might be one of her exboyfriends, most of whom she could hardly remember because their acquaintance has been so brief, but he certainly didn’t look like one. He was wearing a suit and tie. The suit looked sufficiently old-fashioned and worn to have come from the bargain end of an Oxfam rail, but it was still a suit. He was also way too old—sixty if he was a day—and way too thin, with hardly an ounce of spare flesh on him. The fact that he was so tall made him look almost skeletal.

Sheila would have found it easier to believe in him if he’d been wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a scythe. He was carrying a huge briefcase—so huge that it as a miracle he’d been able to cross the estate without being mugged.

“What do you want?” Sheila asked, bluntly.

“You aren’t who you think you are, Sheila,” was his reply to that—which immediately made her think “religious nut.” The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses had stopped coming to the estate years ago, because there were far easier places in the world to do missionary work—Somalia, for instance, or the parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban still ruled supreme—but it wasn’t inconceivable that there were people in the world who could still believe that God’s protection even extended to places like this.

“Everybody around here is who they think they are,” she told him. “Nobody has any illusions about being anybody. This is the end of the world, and I’m not talking Rapture.”

“I knew this wasn’t going to be easy,” the tall man said.

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