The moon was nearly full, and in the pale moonlight both of his new friends did look remarkably like huge frogs. Or possibly camels.
The three of them walked to the end of the rusted pier, and Seth and/or Wilf pointed out to Ben the ruins of sunken R’lyeh in the bay, visible in the moonlight, beneath the sea, and Ben was overcome by what he kept explaining was a sudden and unforeseen attack of seasickness, and was violently and unendingly sick over the metal railings, into the black sea below…
After that it all got a bit odd.
Ben Lassiter awoke on the cold hillside with his head pounding, and a bad taste in his mouth. His head was resting on his backpack. There was rocky moorland on each side of him, and no sign of a road, and no sign of any village, scenic, charming, delightful or even picturesque.
He stumbled and limped almost a mile to the nearest road, and walked along it until he reached a petrol station.
They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called The Book of Dead Names. He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich, but, that if he was dead set on wandering the country taking drugs, young Ernie who worked the afternoon shift would be all too happy to sell him a nice little bag of homegrown cannabis, if he could come back after lunch.
Ben pulled out his Walking Tour of the British Coastline book and tried to find Innsmouth in it, to prove to them that he had not dreamed it, but he was unable to locate the page it had been on, if ever it had been there at all. Most of one page, however, had been ripped out, roughly, about halfway through the book.
And then Ben telephoned a taxi, which took him to Bootle railway station, where he caught a train, which took him to Manchester, where he got on an aeroplane, which took him to Chicago, where he changed planes, and flew to Dallas, where he got another plane going north, and he rented a car, and went home.
He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting; although, later in life, he moved to Nebraska, to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night, that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath grey raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.
A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guide book, to set his mind at rest; but he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
ROBERT M. PRICE is the editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu and is one of the most acclaimed Lovecraft scholars and editors in the world. As a prominent American theologian, he brings a unique perspective to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, drawing in authors from a wide spectrum of styles and backgrounds.
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