Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,
That Thy coming be soon,
And that of Thy kindred dreamers.
I am Thy priest and adore Thee…”
And as the core grew smaller yet, he toppled the evil idol into its green center, following this act by throwing in the tablets and all those other items of fabled antiquity until the inner tent was quite empty. He would have kept all these things if he dared, but his orders—those orders he received in dreams from R’lyeh—would not allow it. When a priest had been found to replace Hamilton Tharpe, then Great Cthulhu would find a way to return those rudimentary pillars of His temple!
Finally, Henley switched off the single dim light and watched the green core as it shrank to a tiny point of intense brightness before winking out. Only the smell of deep ocean remained, and a damp circle in the dark where the sawdust floor was queerly marked and slimy…
• • •
Some little time later the folk of the fairground were awakened by the clamour of a fire engine as it sped to the blaze on the border of the circling tents, sideshows and caravans. Both Tharpe’s caravan and The Tomb of the Great Old Ones were burning fiercely.
Nothing was saved, and in their frantic toiling to help the firemen the nomads of the funfair failed to note that their dogs again crouched timid and whimpering beneath the nighted caravans. They found it strange later, though, when they heard how the police had failed to discover anything of Anderson Tharpe’s remains.
The gap that the destruction of the one-time freak-house had left was soon filled, for “Madame Zala”, as if summoned back by the grim work of the mysterious fire, returned with her horse and caravan within the week. She is still with Hodgson’s Funfair, but she will never speak of the Tharpes. At certain times of the year well known to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult, she is sometimes seen crossing herself with an obscure and pagan sign…
The Taint
The Taint was written December 2002 to January 2003, specifically for editor Steve Jones’ proposed Mythos collection, “Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth,” a volume dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s darkly mysterious seaport ‘town of ill repute’ inhabited by the changeling Deep Ones, those less than human, amphibious worshippers of Lord Cthulhu in his house in R’lyeh. One of only a very few recent Mythos tales by my hand, apart from its unavoidable, indeed obligatory backdrop, this story escapes almost entirely from Lovecraft’s literary influence to become wholly original, and I consider it on a par with Born of the Winds written all of thirty years earlier. Fedogan & Bremer published The Taint in a limited edition of “Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth” in time to launch the book at the World Fantasy Convention, Madison WI, November 2005…
James Jamieson looked through binoculars at the lone figure on the beach—a male figure, at the rim of the sea—and said, “That’s pretty much what I would have wanted to do, when I was his age. Beachcombing, or writing books; maybe poetry? Or just bumming my way around the world. But my folks had other ideas. Just as well, I suppose. ‘No future in poetry, son. Or in daydreaming or beachcombing.’ That was my father, a doctor in his own right. Like father like son, right?” Lowering his binoculars, he smiled at the others with him. “Still, I think I would have enjoyed it.”
“Beachcombing, in the summer? Oh, I could understand that well enough!” John Tremain, the middle-aged headmaster at the technical college in St. Austell, answered him. “The smell of the sea, the curved horizon way out there, sea breezes in your hair, and the wailing of the gulls? Better than the yelping of brats any time—oh yes! The sun’s sparkle on the sea and warm sand between your toes—it’s very seductive. But this late in the season, and in my career?” He shook his head. “Thanks, but no thanks. You won’t find me with my hands in my pockets, sauntering along the tidemark and picking over the seaweed.”
He paused, shrugged, and continued, “Not now, anyway. But on the other hand, when I was a young fellow teaching arts and crafts: carpentry and joinery, woodcraft in general—I mean, working with woods as opposed to surviving in them—now would have been the ideal time for a stroll on the beach. And I used to do quite a bit of it. Yes, indeed. For it’s autumn when the best pieces get washed ashore.”
“Pieces?” Jilly White came back from wherever her thoughts had momentarily wandered, blinked her pretty but clouded green eyes at Tremain, then glanced from face to face in search of a hint, a clue. “I’m sorry, John, but I wasn’t quite…?”
“Driftwood,” the teacher smiled. “All those twisted, sandpapered roots that get tumbled in with the tide when the wind’s off the sea. Those bleached, knotted, gargoyle branches. It’s a long time ago now, but—” He almost sighed, gave another shrug, and finished off, “But searching for driftwood was as close as I ever got to being a beachcomber.”
And Doreen, his tall, slender, haughty but not unattractive wife, said, “You’ve visited with us often enough, Jilly. Surely you must have noticed John’s carvings? They were all driftwood originally, washed up on the beach there.”
And now they all looked at Jilly…
There were four of them, five if you included Jilly White’s daughter, Anne, curled up with a book in the lee of a sand-dune some twenty-five yards down the beach and out of earshot. Above her, a crest of crabgrass like some buried sand-giant’s eyebrow framed the girl where her curled body described a malformed eye in the dune’s hollow. And that was where Jilly White’s mind had been: on her fifteen-year-old daughter, there in the lee of the dune; and on the muffled, shuffling beachcomber on the far side of the dunes, near the water’s edge where the waves frothed and the sand was dark and damp.
All of them were well wrapped against a breeze off the sea that wasn’t so much harsh as constant, unremitting. Only endure it long enough, it would cool your ears and start to find a way through your clothes. It was getting like that now; not yet the end of September, but the breeze made it feel a lot later.
“John’s carvings?” said Jilly, who was still a little distant despite that she was right there with the others on Doctor (or ex-Doctor) James Jamieson’s verandah overlooking the beach. But now, suddenly, she snapped to. “Oh, his carvings! The driftwood! Why, yes, of course I’ve noticed them—and admired them, honestly—John’s driftwood carvings. Silly of me, really. I’m sorry, John, but when you said ‘pieces’ I must have been thinking of something broken. Broken in pieces, you know?”
And Jamieson thought: She looks rather fragile herself. Not yet broken but certainly brittle…as if she might snap quite easily. And taking some of the attention, the weight off Jilly, he said, “Scrimshaw, eh? How interesting. I’d enjoy to see your work some time.”
“Any time at all,” Tremain answered. “But, er, while it’s a bit rude of me to correct you, er, James, it isn’t scrimshaw.”
“Oh?” The old man looked taken aback. “It isn’t?”
The headmaster opened his mouth to explain, but before he could utter another word his wife, Doreen, cut in with, “Scrimshaw is the art or handicraft of old-time sailors, Doctor.” She could be a little stiff with first names. “Well, art of a sort, anyway.” And tut-tutting—apparently annoyed by the breeze—she paused to brush back some ruffled, dowdy-looking strands of hair from her forehead before explaining further. “Scrimshaw is the name they’ve given to those odd designs that they carve on shells and old whalebones and such.”
“Ah!” Jamieson exclaimed. “But of course it is!” And glancing at Jilly, now huddling to herself, shivering a little and looking pale, he smiled warmly and said, “So you see, Jilly my dear, you’re not alone in mixing things up this afternoon. What with driftwood and scrimshaw and the wind—which is picking up I think, and blowing our brains about—why, it’s easy to lose track of things and fall out with the facts. Maybe we should go inside, eh? A glass of cognac will do us the world of good, and I’ll treat you to something I’ve newly discovered: a nice slice of homemade game pie from that bakery in the village. Then I’ll be satisfied that I’ve at least fed and watered you, and warmed your bones, before I let you go off home.”