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 welclass="underline" 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.