“I don’t want to go up, I want to go down! We need to call the police. Where’s the nearest phone?”
“Oh, yeah” retorted Gary, sarcastically. “Good luck finding a working payphone around here. Look, I’ll get us out of town, right out of here, I promise. First you have to come and see this. Hurry up, it’s already gone half one.”
“You must be out of your mind!” insisted Carla. “You want me to climb over a wet roof, at night, in this wind? With a gang of maniacs out looking for me? Forget it!”
“It’s safe, I’m telling you. I’ll go first, it’ll be fine. Hurry up! Give me your hand!”
Muttering uneasily, Carla reached up and took hold of his hand, climbing onto the handrail and then up onto the roof as he pulled. Far from a panorama, it was hard to see anything beyond the nearest streetlights, glowing sullenly through the berserk squall. She hoped they were as hard to see from the ground as the ground was to see from up there.
Gary picked a path across the corrugated roof to the far end, and she followed, cursing nervously every time she was buffeted by the wind. When she caught up with the teenager he was levering a stout-looking plank into position, grunting with effort. He and his friends had obviously stashed it up here for just this purpose. The near end of it wedged snugly under a loose length of ridge flashing while he swung the far end out into the darkness, finally bringing it gently to rest under the lip of a rusting air conditioning unit on the opposite roof.
Carla backed away slowly, hands raised in protest. “That cannot be safe!”
“It’s cool, really, I’ve done it loads.” Gary assured her, sitting down on the plank and beckoning to her. It’s, like, ten feet, that’s all.”
“More like twenty. And more than that down, if we fall off.”
“Which we won’t. Come on, it’s really easy. You just sit on it and scooch along, and you’re on the other side in no time. When we get there though, you’ve got to creep along. No footsteps at all or they’ll hear it inside. OK?”
Carla played for time. “And then?”
“So, we crawl over to the skylight. They’ll open the hidden trapdoor. You can see right down into it when they open it. Come on.”
So saying, he straddled the plank and began to leapfrog his way across it. Carla watched him go, shielding her eyes against the rain with one arm. She’d be crazy to follow him. She didn’t even care what they were doing in the warehouse. That was for the police to deal with now. She could tell them about the trapdoor, they could look for it. Though it might help if she could tell them why, give them a reason to do so. So far she was just a victim of an assault. Her attacker was already dead too, why would they risk raiding a church because of that? It would be easier to just arrest Gary for patricide. Besides, what was in there? What was this ‘shoggoth’?
Gary had reached the other side now and was beckoning to her with impatient swats of his hand. Reluctantly, Carla muted her doubts, sat down on the plank and pulled herself forwards, feet dangling in space.
The wind tore at her hair and clothes, threatening to disorientate her. A thick splinter drove into her thumb as she dragged herself forward, but she didn’t dare let go for long enough to remove it. By the time she was halfway across, the plank was beginning to flex alarmingly under her weight. Thirty feet down onto waste ground studded with rocks and industrial shrapnel. Better not to think about it. Better not to think at all.
Gary gripped her arm and pulled her to safety at the far side, pre-empting her expressions of relief with a stern ‘shhh!’ and a finger to his lips. He pointed to the far end of the roof, where a large skylight was glowing softly in the darkness. Moving slowly, he led her towards it.
Carla could hear voices now, rumbling indistinctly beneath them. The sound grew louder as they approached the skylight, resolving into a chorus of guttural chanting. Gary raised his head and risked a quick look through the glass. Apparently satisfied, he beckoned Carla closer and urged her to do the same.
She looked.
Myriad rivulets of rainwater trickled down the pane, distorting the view, but she could easily identify Reverend Esgrith almost directly below her. He had exchanged his tracksuit for a crumpled shirt and an unconvincing bowtie with a pair of shapeless jeans. He was striding around the stage in front of the altar, fixing the congregation with his cataract-smeared eyes and fervently endorsing something-or-other, Carla couldn’t make out what.
His audience listened with rapt attention, swaying gently on their feet. Carla scanned the rows with growing horror, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes.
One or two of the participants she recognized – there was Mrs Taub, near the back – but there was no way that half of them could walk the streets, even the streets of Innsmouth, in daylight. Bulbous, jet-black eyes, atrophied extremities and seeping mucilage were everywhere. One woman perched unsteadily in a wheelchair, her bare legs coiled repeatedly around each other like mating snakes, her eyes almost fused in the centre of her face. Leaning on the handles of her chair was a man; his mouth lined with a profusion of needle-like teeth, the lower jaw colossal and gaping like that of some abyssal predator. The man at his side had horrific, translucent skin that glistened with ooze. He had no eyes or nose and only a tiny, pulsating hole for a mouth. Carla could clearly see the shadow of his disintegrating skull below the ectoplasmic flesh of his face.
And so it went throughout the hall. There, a woman with the bulging eyes of a trilobite, her fingers fused into two sets of blunt pincers. A man in the front row pouted back at Esgrith from a mouth ringed by obscene, quivering tendrils. Another figure’s head was mercifully hidden under the hood of her coat, the only thing visible a protruding snout, like that of a seahorse.
But it got worse. In the shadows by the sides of the stage lurked even more appalling things. Things, perhaps two dozen of them – had they once been people? – which were so degenerate that the other occupants of the room looked almost normal by comparison.
Some had characteristics that were reminiscent of some type of prehistoric shark. Others resembled ghastly, slobbering hybrids of mammal and octopus, or ray, or amphibian. None retained any traits of clearly, unambiguously human behavior or biology. Their movements, their snaking appendages blindly tasting the air, their palpitations and gasping breaths were those of deep-sea creatures dying on the deck of a trawler, ill-suited to their environment and barely able even to comprehend it.
Carla rolled away from the skylight in shock. Rain drenched her face as she stared up at the hulking clouds overhead. She wanted to evaporate and float away with them, just leave forever a biology that was capable of that kind of degradation, that kind of loathsomeness. She thought of her mother, standing in church, speaking in tongues and celebrating the wisdom and mercy of an all-powerful God, while elsewhere there were people eagerly subjecting themselves to such monstrous and appalling transformations. In the world Carla believed in, things like this weren’t possible, people like this just weren’t possible. She thought again of the heaving, debased atrocities lining the stage, their eyes so useless in the upper air, their tentacles and fans writhing autonomically. There was no individual left there, no trace left of a human mind. They had surrendered that. It had been obliterated.
There was a grinding noise from below. “Here we go, quick, look at this!” hissed Gary, still watching what was going on inside.
“I don’t want to” answered Carla distantly. “I don’t want to see anymore. I don’t care.”
“Come on, they’re going to open the trapdoor!”
Carla closed her eyes, wiped rain and tears from her face and reluctantly levered herself into a sitting position again. Inside the warehouse, the congregation was pulling the wooden stage away from the altar, revealing an iron trapdoor eight feet across. It was secured with four heavy padlocks. Esgrith passed a bunch of keys to one of his acolytes who removed the locks and tied a length of rope to one of the hasps, flinging the length of it back into the congregation. The crowd fell on it and began to pull.