The overall effect was almost toadlike, an impression that was only reinforced when he replied to Dr Khalil in a guttural tone that managed to be both drawling and stentorian at the same time.
Carla was so mesmerised by his appearance that it was only when Dr Khalil tugged at her sleeve that she realised they had finished talking. Looking grave, Khalil guided her back out into the ashy sunlight and fresh air.
“My God!” exclaimed Carla, as soon as they were outside.
“You see?” said the examiner.
“Are they – is he related to any of the kids in the car?”
“Not as far as I know” replied Khalil, beginning to walk towards the seafront again. “Just Innsmouth born and bred. Like that man over there.”
He pointed at the driver of a rusting, white taxi that had parked on the other side of the street. The man was smoking a cigarette and flicking idly through the pages of what appeared to be a pornographic magazine. He looked to be Latino, but had the same peculiar dishevelment of features as the man in the shop.
“I – I don’t get it.” admitted Carla. By way of response, Dr Khalil nodded at a kiosk selling newspapers and cigarettes. Carla followed his gaze. A morbidly obese woman with a dirty face glared back at her with another pair of unnaturally offset eyes.
Carla’s confusion mounted. She turned as if to demand answers of the examiner, thought better of it, and wheeled about again. Her brain worked furiously, trying to reconcile the evidence of her eyes, cycling through and discarding explanations. Dr Khalil laid a hand on her shoulder and opened his mouth to say something. Carla shook his hand off and marched towards the news kiosk.
The woman regarded her approach warily, giving the minutest nod in response to Carla’s faux-jolly “good morning”. Her skin, Carla saw, was not dry or peeling like the others, but seemed to be coated in an unnaturally thick film of glutinous sebum. Dried mucous was crusted around her nostrils, and the highly unconvincing golden ringlets hanging around her face were obviously a wig. As she approached, Carla’s nostrils were assailed by a powerful stench that strongly suggested the woman would benefit from a course of metronidazole.
Carla asked her for a local paper. The vendor sniffed and licked her lips before replying. Her tongue was bizarrely pointed with a grey discolouration, and Carla thought she saw a row of strange, ring-like weals on the bottom of it before it darted back behind small, sharp-looking teeth.
“Ain’t ’ere yet” croaked the woman, huskily.
“Er… oh! Right. Well… um… a bottle of water, please.”
The woman sighed wetly and sniffed again, but groped under the counter for a bottle of mineral water nonetheless. She dropped it clumsily on the magazines arrayed in front of her, her gloved fingers momentarily undulating upwards… Carla blinked. Upwards? She thrust a banknote towards the woman, telling her to keep the change, and strode back towards Dr Khalil, ready to assail him with questions. The examiner gave her a warning look, touched her elbow, and resumed course for the sea front.
“What is going on here?” hissed Carla, as soon as they were out of earshot. “That woman… all of them. How long have you known about this?”
The examiner considered the question. “Well, I suppose it depends on your definition” he answered, carefully. “Since I arrived in the area, I’ve heard mutterings about people from Innsmouth. People saying they’re ugly, not to be trusted… I just put it down to the kind of local rivalry you tend to get in these places. After I saw the car crash victims I took more of an interest. I came to interview the families, to see if I could find an explanation for their… physiologies, and I saw it even more pronounced in their parents. And all over the town. Which is when I decided to report it.”
“You reported it to the EPA first though.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Did you find something?”
“Well, I wanted to report it to somebody, and the only explanation I could think of was that these people had been exposed to some kind of environmental hazard.”
Carla weighed the possibility. “PCBs, heavy metals, something like that?”
The examiner nodded. “Yes. Something – I hate to resort to clichè, but – something in the water, perhaps? They say there used to be a gold refinery in the town, many years ago. I don’t know how one refines gold, but it doesn’t seem impossible that they could have used something unpleasant. Maybe something that leached into the ground, polluted the water table.”
“It would have to be something pretty exotic to cause a syndrome as specific as this” pointed out Carla. The examiner shook his head. “No. I changed my mind about that. I don’t think it fits anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it seems to me that the symptoms – can we call them symptoms now? – are more pronounced in the older residents.”
“So, not a teratogen then. It has to be something that has a cumulative dose effect, accumulates in the tissues over time. If it takes a few years of exposure to build up to a toxic level—”
“Again, no. Visitors to the town do not seem to be affected. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, people who work here, may have been here for many years. They have no trace of illness. It is only in the people who are born here, in the families that have been here for many generations. I have dismissed radioactive contamination, also, for this reason.”
“No, ionising rads wouldn’t do this. Besides, you’d see cancers.” murmured Carla, thinking out loud. “Well then, what?”
The doctor gestured with his hands, palms up. “I do not know. I am hoping that you have encountered something like this before.”
Carla didn’t reply. She didn’t want to admit that she had no more idea than the examiner did. Less, by the sound of it.
They walked in silence for a while. The buildings here were even more rundown than those in the town centre, their walls stained black by decades of moss. The road had narrowed to a single lane with no sidewalk, but there was no traffic to endanger them.
Bloated gulls called to them forlornly as they emerged onto the seafront. Not the stout, mustard-beaked herring gulls that would once have commanded the coast. These were sad and degraded inland scavengers, living off cold fries and discarded sandwiches, nesting in bins and painting the shoreline with high-cholesterol diarrhoea.
It was deserted in both directions. The promenade, Water Street, had none of the trappings that might entice tourists to the coast. Apart from one very unwelcoming-looking bar, it consisted entirely of ancient warehouses. Several had collapsed completely into rubble. Still others had been shored up with what looked like pieces of flotsam to avert a similar fate. A few had been partially refurbished, with corrugated metal doors and fresh cement.
They crossed the road to stand by the low harbour wall. The water beneath was murky, thick with weed and kelp where it splashed against the slabs of stone. To their left, where the road curved around to the other jaw of the harbour, a rotting wooden infrastructure allowed access to jetties and moorings. An impressive amount of rubbish had accumulated around and beneath it, mainly bags, bottles and cans. The only boats moored amongst the detritus were a couple of small fishing vessels, and a handful of dinghies of assorted seaworthiness.
Carla leaned on the wall and gazed out to sea. In the middle-distance, waves burst angrily against the thin black line of a reef. Next to it, a safe water buoy periodically pulsed with red light. She remembered the flickering light that she had seen the previous night, while driving into Innsmouth. It must have been fishermen, out on those rocks.