He pointed toward the west of the town, toward the cliffs. As I stared a bonfire was kindled on the cliff-tops; it flared and began to burn with a copper-green flame.
“They’re going to wake the Deep Ones,” said the barman. “The stars and the planets and the moon are all in the right places. It’s time. The dry lands will sink, and the seas shall rise...”
“For the world shall be cleansed with ice and floods and I’ll thank you to keep to your own shelf in the refrigerator,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. What’s the quickest way to get up to those cliffs?”
“Back up Marsh Street. Hang a left at the Church of Dagon, till you reach Manuxet Way and then just keep on going.” He pulled a coat off the back of the door, and put it on. “C’mon. I’ll walk you up there. I’d hate to miss any of the fun.”
“You sure?”
“No one in town’s going to be drinking tonight.” We stepped out, and he locked the door to the bar behind us.
It was chilly in the street, and fallen snow blew about the ground, like white mists. From street level I could no longer tell if Madame Ezekiel was in her den above her neon sign, or if my guests were still waiting for me in my office.
We put our heads down against the wind, and we walked.
Over the noise of the wind I heard the barman talking to himself:
“Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,” he was saying.
“There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise...”
He stopped there, and we walked on together in silence, with blown snow stinging our faces.
And on the surface die, I thought, but said nothing out loud.
Twenty minutes’ walking and we were out of Innsmouth. The Manuxet Way stopped when we left the town, and it became a narrow dirt path, partly covered with snow and ice, and we slipped and slid our way up it in the darkness.
The moon was not yet up, but the stars had already begun to come out. There were so many of them. They were sprinkled like diamond dust and crushed sapphires across the night sky. You can see so many stars from the seashore, more than you could ever see back in the city.
At the top of the cliff, behind the bonfire, two people were waiting—one huge and fat, one much smaller. The barman left my side and walked over to stand beside them, facing me.
“Behold,” he said, “the sacrificial wolf.” There was now an oddly familiar quality to his voice.
I didn’t say anything. The fire was burning with green flames, and it lit the three of them from below; classic spook lighting.
“Do you know why I brought you up here?” asked the barman, and I knew then why his voice was familiar: it was the voice of the man who had attempted to sell me aluminium siding.
“To stop the world ending?”
He laughed at me, then.
The second figure was the fat man I had found asleep in my office chair. “Well, if you’re going to get eschatological about it...” he murmured, in a voice deep enough to rattle walls. His eyes were closed. He was fast asleep.
The third figure was shrouded in dark silks and smelled of patchouli oil. It held a knife. It said nothing.
“This night,” said the barman, “the moon is the moon of the Deep Ones. This night are the stars configured in the shapes and patterns of the dark, old times. This night, if we call them, they will come. If our sacrifice is worthy. If our cries are heard.”
The moon rose, huge and amber and heavy, on the other side of the bay, and a chorus of low croaking rose with it from the ocean far beneath us.
Moonlight on snow and ice is not daylight, but it will do. And my eyes were getting sharper with the moon: in the cold waters men like frogs were surfacing and submerging in a slow water-dance. Men like frogs, and women, too: it seemed to me that I could see my landlady down there, writhing and croaking in the bay with the rest of them.
It was too soon for another change; I was still exhausted from the night before; but I felt strange under that amber moon.
“Poor wolf-man,” came a whisper from the silks. “All his dreams have come to this; a lonely death upon a distant cliff.”
I will dream if I want to, I said, and my death is my own affair. But I was unsure if I had said it out loud.
Senses heighten in the moon’s light; I heard the roar of the ocean still, but now, overlaid on top of it, I could hear each wave rise and crash; I heard the splash of the frog people; I heard the drowned whispers of the dead in the bay; I heard the creak of green wrecks far beneath the ocean.
Smell improves, too. The aluminium-siding man was human, while the fat man had other blood in him.
And the figure in the silks...
I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat, and rotten flesh.
The silks fluttered. She was moving towards me. She held the knife.
“Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber colour, and filling my mind with its pale light.
“Madame Ezekiel?”
“You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”
“I don’t die,” I told her. “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night. Remember?”
“It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”
“No.”
The bonfire burned brighter now, burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae, and of slowly-drifting weed; burned with the colour of emeralds.
“You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife, and you kill them. That’s all.”
I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.
She sliced across my throat.
Blood began to gush, and then to flow. And then it slowed, and stopped...
—The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming towards me from the night
—I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt —my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night.
My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air. I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow. I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her. There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist surrounding me. High in my leap I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soapbubble...
***
I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor, at the entrance to some kind of citadel, built of enormous, rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.
A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.
She was standing in the doorway, in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.
There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms, and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.