So I sat still and waited for the dusty black telephone on my desk to ring, while the light slowly leaked away from the winter sky.
Ring.
A man’s voice: Had I thought about aluminium siding? I put down the phone.
There was no heating in the office. I wondered how long the fat man had been asleep in the armchair.
Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. A crying woman implored me to help her find her five-year-old daughter, missing since last night, stolen from her bed.
The family dog had vanished too.
I don’t do missing children, I told her. I’m sorry: too many bad memories. I put down the telephone, feeling sick again.
It was getting dark now, and, for the first time since I had been in Innsmouth, the neon sign across the street flicked on. It told me that Madame Ezekiel performed TAROT READINGS AND PALMISTRY. Red neon stained the falling snow the colour of new blood.
Armageddon is averted by small actions. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it always has to be.
The phone rang a third time. I recognised the voice; it was the aluminium-siding man again. “You know,” he said, chattily, “transformation from man to animal and back being, by definition, impossible, we need to look for other solutions. Depersonalisation, obviously, and likewise some form of projection. Brain damage? Perhaps. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia? Laughably so. Some cases have been treated with intravenous thioridazine hydrochloride.”
“Successfully?”
He chuckled. “That’s what I like. A man with a sense of humour. I’m sure we can do business.”
“I told you already. I don’t need aluminium siding.”
“Our business is more remarkable than that, and of far greater importance. You’re new in town, Mr. Talbot. It would be a pity if we found ourselves at, shall we say, loggerheads?”
“You can say whatever you like, pal. In my book you’re just another adjustment, waiting to be made.”
“We’re ending the world, Mr. Talbot. The Deep Ones will rise out of their ocean graves and eat the moon like a ripe plum.”
“Then I won’t ever have to worry about full moons any more, will I?”
“Don’t try and cross us,” he began, but I growled at him, and he fell silent.
Outside my window the snow was still falling.
Across Marsh Street, in the window directly opposite mine, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen stood in the ruby glare of her neon sign, and she stared at me.
She beckoned, with one finger.
I put down the phone on the aluminium-siding man for the second time that afternoon, went downstairs, and crossed the street at something close to a run; but I looked both ways before I crossed.
She was dressed in silks. The room was lit only by candles, and stank of incense and patchouli oil.
She smiled at me as I walked in, beckoned me over to her seat by the window. She was playing a card game with a Tarot deck, some version of solitaire. As I reached her, one elegant hand swept up the cards, wrapped them in a silk scarf, placed them gently in a wooden box.
The scents of the room made my head pound. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realised; perhaps that was what was making me light-headed. I sat down, across the table from her, in the candle-light.
She extended her hand, and took my hand in hers.
She stared at my palm, touched it, softly, with her forefinger.
“Hair?” She was puzzled.
“Yeah, well. I’m on my own a lot.” I grinned. I had hoped it was a friendly grin, but she raised an eyebrow at me anyway.
“When I look at you,” said Madame Ezekiel, “this is what I see. I see the eye of a man. Also I see the eye of a wolf. In the eye of a man I see honesty, decency, innocence. I see an upright man who walks on the square. And in the eye of a wolf I see a groaning and a growling, night howls and cries, I see a monster running with blood-flecked spittle in the darkness of the borders of the town.”
“How can you see a growl or a cry?”
She smiled. “It is not hard,” she said. Her accent was not American. It was Russian, or Maltese, or Egyptian perhaps. “In the eye of the mind we see many things.”
Madame Ezekiel closed her green eyes. She had remarkably long eyelashes; her skin was pale, and her black hair was never still—it drifted gently around her head, in the silks, as if it were floating on distant tides.
“There is a traditional way,” she told me. “A way to wash off a bad shape. You stand in running water, in clear spring water, while eating white rose petals.”
“And then?”
“The shape of darkness will be washed from you.”
“It will return,” I told her, “with the next full of the moon.”
“So,” said Madame Ezekiel, “once the shape is washed from you, you open your veins in the running water. It will sting mightily, of course. But the river will carry the blood away.”
She was dressed in silks, in scarves and cloths of a hundred different colours, each bright and vivid, even in the muted light of the candles.
Her eyes opened.
“Now,” she said. “The Tarot.” She unwrapped her deck from the black silk scarf that held it, passed me the cards to shuffle. I fanned them, riffed and bridged them.
“Slower, slower,” she said. “Let them get to know you. Let them love you, like... like a woman would love you.”
I held them tightly, then passed them back to her.
She turned over the first card. It was called The Warwolf. It showed darkness and amber eyes, a smile in white and red.
Her green eyes showed confusion. They were the green of emeralds. “This is not a card from my deck,” she said, and turned over the next card. “What did you do to my cards?”
“Nothing, Ma’am. I just held them. That’s all.”
***
The card she had turned over was The Deep One. It showed something green and faintly octopoid. The thing’s mouths—if they were indeed mouths and not tentacles—began to writhe on the card as I watched.
She covered it with another card, and then another, and another. The rest of the cards were blank pasteboard.
“Did you do that?” She sounded on the verge of tears.
“No.”
“Go now,” she said.
“But—”
“Go.” She looked down, as if trying to convince herself I no longer existed.
I stood up, in the room that smelled of incense and candle-wax, and looked out of her window, across the street. A light flashed, briefly, in my office window. Two men, with flashlights, were walking around. They opened the empty filing cabinet, peered around, then took up their positions, one in the armchair, the other behind the door, waiting for me to return. I smiled to myself. It was cold and inhospitable in my office, and with any luck they would wait there for hours until they finally decided I wasn’t coming back.
So I left Madame Ezekiel turning over her cards, one by one, staring at them as if that would make the pictures return; and I went downstairs, and walked back down Marsh Street until I reached the bar.
The place was empty, now; the barman was smoking a cigarette, which he stubbed out as I came in.
“Where are the chess-fiends?”
“It’s a big night for them tonight. They’ll be down at the bay. Let’s see: you’re a Jack Daniel’s? Right?”
“Sounds good.”
He poured it for me. I recognised the thumb-print from the last time I had the glass. I picked up the volume of Tennyson poems from the bar-top.
“Good book?”
The fox-haired barman took his book from me, opened it and read:
“Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth...”
I’d finished my drink. “So? What’s your point?”
He walked around the bar, took me over to the window. “See? Out there?”